The Academic Connection

Endangered Evidence

Ever wonder how all those animals, plants and bugs get on the Endangered Species List? It’s more than an academic question though that is where the answer has its roots.

When a critter gets on the ESL, nothing can be done to its “habitat,” even if it is just a candidate for the list whose endangerment remains undecided. Proscribed acts include, of course, drilling for oil.

Thus as gas prices soar, no refineries. Oil companies have not built a refinery in the United States in 30 years. That’s almost as long as the ESA has been, effectively, the law of the land.

A good many endangered species, and the candidates that would join them, are in oil-rich states. In fact, there are thousands of species on the ESL.

All it takes to get one on is a senior college or university biology paper. As it happens, one of the few species that came off the list made its exit due to factual errors in the thesis that put the thing on the roster in the first place.

This effort comes on top of a regulatory mountain that is already overwhelming and threatens to increase the federal government’s already heavy hand in private land usage. The federal government itself owns at least a third of America’s 750 million acres.

And heaven help you if you are a private citizen fighting what you perceive to be a wrongful determination under the ESA. Environmental lawyers will tell you that it costs at least $500,000 to defend a client against an environmental charge if he or she is innocent.

Another Dream

Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-GA, whose belting of a Capitol Hill cop knocked controversial Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, right off the front pages of many metropolitan newspapers, is also a Rhodes professor at Cornell. She has landed in this slot despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, at the tender age of 51, she is still “expected to complete a Ph.D.” at U Cal-Berkeley.

She has at least one other accomplishment—the federal highway she named after herself when she secured funding for it. Residents of her district say that on one of the Cynthia McKinney Parkway exits, the first thing that you see is the “Free at Last Bail Bondsman.” Somehow we doubt that that is the dream Martin Luther King, Jr. was dreaming of.

Revised History

Contrasting the history that we are taught and the actual past is always interesting. “At the siege of Drogheda, thousands were butchered when Cromwell flew into one of his rages and turned the city over to his troops for ‘a day and a night of uncalculated butchery,’” Diane Moczar writes in Latin Mass magazine. “Besides the three thousand dead, some fifty thousand were sold into slavery in the West Indies.”

“Even when his rage subsided, Cromwell apparently did not repent of the atrocity; indeed, he called it ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches’.” Dr. Moczar, the author of Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know, teaches History at Northern Virginia Community College.

She is also the author of Don’t Know Much About Catholic History. So how does she compare her research on the pivotal British leader with that of her peers? “Thus Oliver Cromwell, [is] in my view a monster if ever there was one, though he is much praised in history books,” Dr. Moczar concludes.

Catholic Higher Education?

The editor of Latin Mass, Father James Lucas, makes some interesting points about the comments we see from church fathers on matters such as birth control and AIDS. “The orchestrated collaborative public drumbeat of allied progressive prelates, theologians and journalists has worked almost flawlessly since the revolt of the Rhine alliance of bishops in the opening days of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962,” he writes. “Even if the progressives fail to effect whatever changes they are pursuing, it softens up the Catholic world for the successful employment of Plan B.”

“In this stratagem, the hierarchy never enforces the traditional teaching, the professorial class teaches the opposite at seminaries and at Catholic universities and colleges, and the journalists write their pieces on how the Catholic priests and laity have parted ways with a hopelessly intransigent Vatican.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.