Delicate and Fragile

There are at least three expressions whose qualifiers get my dander up.

The first is "the most essential," which is like "the most fif-teenth." It's either essential or it isn't.

The second is "brutally murdered." I wonder how one mur-ders gently, considerately and lovingly.

But the one that really gets to me is "the delicate checks and balances of nature."

Yes, nature does take care of its own stability by what engin-eers call negative feedback loops: part of the effect is fed back to the cause, diminishing it when the effect increases, and strengthening the cause when the effect grows smaller. For example, if an increased content of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to lead to significant global warming (an utterly unproven hunch), more water would evaporate and more clouds would form to reflect more of the incident solar energy, thus reducing the solar energy reaching the earth's surface.

In biology, the population explosion of one species causes a population explosion of the species that feeds on it, until the former balance is restored, at first by overabundance of the hunters, then by a shortage of the prey. In this and most other cases of feedback, the stable balance is not approached steadily, but in a series of diminishing oscillations overshooting and undershooting the final stable level.

Strange as it may seem, these cycles have somehow managed to keep the geophysical and biological balance on earth for mil-lennia entirely without help from the US Congress or other megalomaniac assemblies wishing to legislate natural laws.

But the spectacle of Senators Kennedy and Dole regulating climate and ozone layer by fines, prohibitions, edicts and injunc-tions pales before the hilarity of the idea that nature's "checks and balances" are delicate and fragile.

Consider what it is these megalomaniacs are trying to regu-late, preserve and save from the "impact" of man.

A single hurricane has the energy of 1,000 hydrogen bombs; to appreciate the energy involved in the evaporation and lifting of water that comes down as rain again, take America's smallest state, Rhode Island, with an area of 1,212 sq. miles and an annual precipitation of 45.32 inches. That means lifting 3.6 billion ton-nes of water to an average height of some 5,000 feet, which itself is peanuts compared to the energy to evaporate it: 300,000 MW-years, or three hundred 1,000 MW power plants working at full capacity night and day. And that's just Rhode Island.

Into this vast arena of gigantic forces and stupendous energies step the bozos of Greenpest, the Fiends of the Earth, the Public Brainwash System (PBS), and the Congress, all screaming their panicky concoctions, much as a bacterium might sneeze onto the toe nail of an elephant.

But simultaneously the Green priests also preach that man is an unimportant cancer on the face of the earth; according to Dave Foreman, founder of "Heil Erde!", man has no more right to life than the HIV virus. By the morality of the entire Eco-Klux-Klan a handful of Northern Spotted Owls (an invented species) is more important than thousands of timber jack families who rejuvenate and take care of the forests that provide them with a living. The entire Green theology is based on sad-dling their followers with a guilt and inferiority complex.

Schizophrenia? That seems to refer to a milder form of in-sanity, like imagining to be alternately Napoleon and Barbara Mikulski. But these raving madmen have introduced an entirely new affliction into the annals of insanity: that of a megalomaniac who suffers from devastating feelings of worthlessness.