In Defense of the Deer Eating Sunflowers

In the State of Colorado a farming consortium has decided to grow sunflowers to turn into biodiesel fuel. The sunflowers are attracting deer and elk to the farm and in the infinite wisdom of officials in the State the pesky critters are going to be gunned down. This consortium is closely connected to Colorado Wild, an organization that has harassed both Telluride and Purgatory ski resorts because they believe expansion of the resorts will hurt wildlife populations in the San Juan Mountains. So let’s get rational here...

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable." The report on this is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. They found that sunflower plants require 118 % more fossil energy than the fuel produced - at 118 % they take much more fossil energy than corn (29 %), switch grass (45 %) and wood (57%).

Costs are incurred in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, and grinding and transporting the crop). Additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers. And how do we measure the costs associated with environmental pollution and degradation? That includes killing of wildlife outside of a hunting season.

In this modern era of computer modeling it is not necessary to destroy wildlife and degrade land for experimentation. And for those who believe that computer modeling does not give accurate predictions perhaps you should tell that to the folks using their computers to tell us the planet is heating up.

Why Are Some Calling Republicans Racists?

Why is it that Republicans are being called “racist” by people who should know better? After reading the comments in the Wahington Post and Wall Street Journal of Ms. Carol Swain that Republicans were racist I have to pause and wonder what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a Republican, would say? Ms. Swain knows well the history of racism in this country, being a political science instructor at Vanderbilt University, so why would she use such inflammatory words in connection with Republicans? Could it be to promote a myth for political purposes or could it be she actually doesn’t know the history of racism in the U.S. or she does not care? One thing even she must agree on is that Dr. King couldn’t have been a Democrat since the Democrats were the people who he was fighting against. Historically Republicans were the anti-slavery party and Lincoln, Democrats were not.

Here are some high points of Democrat Party policies in the United States. Democrats created the Fugitive Slave Laws to keep blacks on the plantations, instigated the Dred Scott decision that said blacks were property, started the KKK in 1866 to attack blacks and whites who stood in the way of white ‘Democrat’ supremacy, created the Black Codes and the Jim Crow Acts. Democrats voted in the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil rights legislation passed by the Republicans including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. It took Republicans almost 6 decades to finally achieve passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950’s and 1960’s (LBJ signed a bill created by Eisenhower and written and fought for by Senator Everett Dirksen, a Republican).

Republicans started the NAACP in 1909 on Lincoln’s 100th birthday and started the Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s). The first black American to head the NAACP was James Weldon Johnson, a Republican. In the modern civil rights era, the era of Dr. King, we had a Democrat Governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox, chasing blacks with ax handles to keep them out of his restaurant and Governor George Wallace of Alabama, also a Democrat, who in 1963 denied black children entry into a school they wanted to attend by standing in the doorway. It was a Republican President – Eisenhower – that sent the National Guard to the school so that the children could enter.

And currently the Democrats in government that are shouting that Republicans are racists with no proof have a figurehead amongst them that they recently called the “conscience of the Senate.” As we know Senator Byrd was a former “Keagle” in the KKK and once said, and I quote verbatim, “I would rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of our become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.”

Dr. King would be a Republican today. He would not embrace the secularist, socialist policies of the Democratic Party. He was guided by his faith and his Republican Party principles in his struggle to gain equality for blacks. My question, and the question countless others have asked and written about, black and white, is why do blacks currently vote as a block for Democrats?