My Own Side

There’s something about the pocket-pets. This one was held by a Veterans For Peace member at the initial press conference announcing that Lt. Ehren Watada was intending to disobey an order to deploy to Iraq with his brigade. After the initial flurry of press coverage I haven’t heard much about him lately. My other pictures of the press conference are here.

The anti-western environmental marxists can’t seem to get off the same old tired theme. The evil west (especially those greedy biotech firms) are pillaging the poor repressed indiginous peoples of formerly colonized lands. At least they came up with a new term to keep us entertained, ‘biopiracy’. From a story in the U.K. Guardian newspaper:

The new piracy: how West ’steals’ Africa’s plants

Swiss and British firms are accused of using the scientific properties of plants from the developing world to make huge profits while giving nothing to the people there. Antony Barnett reports

Shocking! Evil corporate profiteers are importing huge harvesters to trudge across the third world landscape, leaving trails of destruction in their wake as they rape the pristine green landscape of valuable botanicals. The locals watch in horror as their beautiful land is turned into a barren dustbowl!

Well, not exactly. Apparently the former president of the Alpine Garden Society visited Tanzania back in 1976 and took a handful of seeds of a local wildflower back to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. They’ve been happily growing away in the evil west since then, until some brilliant western scientists (who happen to work for a large biotech firm) discovered they they could be crossed with another plant to produce an excellent hybrid for hanging baskets. Other brilliant (western) people with expertise in marketing convinced others to take a risk by investing their money in advertising the result, which seems to have turned out well for them in this case. The article glosses over all of the expensive failures and dead-ends that the firm has had to eat in between successes.

Now the marxists are calling foul, saying that the profits should be shared with the Tanzanians, who have plenty of the plants still on their hills, had no idea the plants were worth anything, never dreamed of crossing them with another plant, wouldn’t know how to begin doing this even if they did dream it, certainly could not have gotten anyone to bankroll the experiment, and didn’t invent the stupid plant in the first place.

Piracy implies theft. And theft generally implies something tangible, like gold, cash or your car. Even in intellectual property theft, such as software or an invention, the victim has to have done work to create something first before it can be stolen. How is biopiracy theft? And who was it ’stolen’ from, exactly?

The eco-nuts simply despise capitalism, western civilization and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives progress. They have the bizarre self-loathing that defines so many on the left.

From the article, here are a few other examples of what they are calling ‘colonial pillaging’.

· A diabetes drug being developed by a British firm that comes from the Libyan plant Artemisia judaica.

· An immuno-suppressant drug being developed by GlaxoSmithKline that comes from a compound found in a termite hill in Gambia.

· A treatment for HIV taken from mycobacteria discovered in mud samples from the Lango district of central Uganda.

· Infection-fighting drugs made from amoebas in Mauritius and Venezuela.

· An anti-diarrhoea vaccine developed from Egyptian microbes.

· A slug barrier made from a Somalian species of myrrh.

All of humanity needs these inventions, and more like them. Calling their discovery ‘piracy’ is insulting.

Across cultures, the concept of “fairness” stands out as a powerful motivator in human relations. We seem to be hard-wired to require justice. When we perceive that justice has been denied, we are unsettled. It is like the sand grain irritant in an oyster, minus the resulting pearl.

Good story writers understand this. They hook us by setting up the injustice in the first chapter. A man’s wife or family is murdered, someone is framed, or the greedy land developer cheats grandma out of her farm. For the rest of the book or the last hour of the movie we are rooted in our seats and waiting for one thing, justice to be served in full measure (and maybe a little more). The writer that denies us this basic need with an unsatisfying ending will not get our business in the future.

In a modern democratic society, we vote for issues and candidates. Passions can run very high during the campaign, but we (generally) can accept the results if we perceive that the process was fair. Unfortunately, the 2000 presidential election was not normal. Democrats lost that election, but it was widely perceived as being unfair, and the political left has remained irritated about it to this day.

I remember following the coverage during that time with an intensity that surprised me. It was like a drawn out, intense drama. At first, it was just something exciting to talk about and follow. I was used to waking up to a winner and a loser, not to an ongoing soap opera. But as it progressed and the results of the recounts came in, it became clear to me that Bush had indeed won. Gore was never ahead in any count, ever. Sadly, I also had to watch as the games began. The lawyers parachuted in (all the seats on the commercial flights were booked by journalists and Jesse Jackson’s entourage). The lawsuits began, trying to jigger the totals slightly to push Gore over the top in various ways, either by selectively recounting heavily Democratic counties, or subtracting votes (like military absentee ones). Gore and his surrogates were on the TV telling us that he was just doing this for Democracy, and The Constitution (and to solve global warming). The Florida Supreme Court was busily rewriting election laws to give him every chance. Now I had an injustice being attempted right in front of my eyes, and I was riveted to the tube watching events unfold.

In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court slapped down the Florida court (twice). “Hey dudes! Knock it off, this affects us too!” Lefties continue to say that the SCOTUS selected Bush. But actually, they simply forced an activist Florida court to abide by existing election law and meet national deadlines for what was a national election, not a local one. This satisfied my need for fairness, as the election was not stolen by any of the tricks that had been tried. But it left the left very bitter. They had been just as riveted by the drama, but the writer had written a screwed up and unsatisfying ending for them.

I want to ask the people who feel that the 2000 election was stolen to consider a few things. The news media did an exhaustive recount of all of the ballots in Florida. Under every scenario that Gore and the Florida Supreme Court had wanted, he still lost. If the SCOTUS had not intervened, he still would have lost, only they would not have made the national deadline.

Kathryn Harris was utterly reviled by the left during the whole fiasco. When faced with a situation where the whole country was watching her every move (and deconstructing her lipstick selection) she did what most bureaucrats would do, she scrupulously followed the letter of the law, except when ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to break it. Should she be blamed for the results favoring Bush? What actions should she have taken instead, and how would they have changed anything?

In 2004 the voters had a chance to right the injustice done by the SCOTUS in 2000. All the “Redefeat Bush 2004″ bumper stickers in the country were not enough to convince the majority to write the desired ending to the story, and they voted him in handily.

And one final question. The Democrats at different times called upon Bush to concede the election to Gore. I need to ask, under what legal authority could he have done so? Al Gore was NEVER ahead in any count. The results of the election were duly certified under and as required by Florida election statutes. If Bush had even wanted to, there was no legal authority for him to concede the election. If he had done so, Al Gore would truly have been an illegal, illegitimate president.

It’s 2006, can we please move on now?