Blustery Winds and the Gobal Warming Scare

Standard apartment blocks in Bucharest
Photo: Wikipedia

A blustery winter Hawk is blowing wind gusts of 60 mph and the temperatures are 15 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.  It is not unusual, it is winter time, and the weather has alternated periods of extreme cold and unusual balmier temperatures. The global warmists, of course, are blaming it on man-made global warming. The climate change industry’s golden goose is laying larger and larger eggs to those who stand to gain from this false narrative. And of course, the biggest gainers are the United Nations and its third world corrupt members who demand ever more redistribution of wealth and destruction of capitalism.

The real reason behind the global warming scare and why the United Nations’ alarmists have been driving us into forced submission of environmentalist stewardship of Mother Earth is that they want capitalism destroyed and replaced with their vision of a utopian communist economy that has never worked across the centuries.

These progressives have a problem with the Industrial Revolution, with “fossil fuels,” (They are not so fossil since the earth keeps producing them), with the only successful economic model that has provided generous income to all these hot-air spewing, idle bureaucrats, who have nothing better to do than meet in exotic locales planning the destruction of the goose that lays the golden eggs that feed their exorbitant lifestyles, salaries, bonuses, and pensions.

Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of U.N.’s Convention on Climate Change, disclosed the real reason for the climate change industry when she told us that they are not interested in saving the world from global warming Armageddon but they want to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Having lived under such economic model that these progressives advocate, I can say with 100 percent certainty that, on a cold day like today, the proletariat in the village would be huddled around a cast iron stove, or an adobe stove made of mud bricks and straw with a cast iron top, or a porcelain stove fed with chopped wood, trying to keep warm further than a few feet from the source of heat, providing they had money to buy the wood, and the wood was available since it was forbidden by the state to cut down trees.

City dwellers, who were forced to live in high rise concrete block quarters, heated their tiny apartments with steam sent from a plant via underground pipes. By the time this steam made its way up to our fifth floor apartment, we were lucky if the ambient temperature was 45-50 degrees F.  Bundled up inside the house like Eskimos, with icicles forming on the inside windows, we sometimes turned on the gas stove to heat the miniature kitchen, if the flame was strong enough. We were slightly better off than our communist Chinese brethren, who did not even have heat in winter time. There were times when we stayed in bed, fully clothed and covered by heavy wool comforters.

Have these promoters of communist utopia and of an unproductive but supposedly “equal” and “socially just” economy ever have to live like this? Of course not, their elitist reality comes from the Ivory Tower of academia, political office, and from college textbooks’ propaganda at Ivy League bastions of progressive thinking that enslaves people rather than frees them to pursue free-market capitalism.

Even the poorest person living under free-market capitalism has food, heat, medicine, health care, electricity, refrigeration, phones, TV, running water, water heaters, a bathroom, and other amenities that make life more pleasant, healthier, and double human life expectancy.

On a day like today when it is so dangerously cold even domesticated animals are sheltered, Americans should remember that these environmental global warmists and the United Nations want to put them out freezing in the cold, in the dark, hungry, sick, and hopelessly dependent on the global elites, who are wealthy, healthy, warm, and happy, bureaucrats that never produced anything, but would control our survival with a law, decree, or a treaty, dropping crumbs to keep us alive and under control.

Copyright:  Ileana Johnson 2015

Sonny and the Red Shouldered Hawk

Sonny the "rescue dog"

Sonny was running back and forth in the wet snow, barking furiously in the direction of the back yard fence. Scott Lingamfelter’s yellow lab was normally quiet, he rarely barked. Something must have really attracted his curiosity.

At first, they ignored him. He will eventually calm down, they thought. Perhaps he saw neighborhood kids outside playing in the snow or building a snowman and he got excited.

It was a cold, snowy day, and everybody was enjoying the cozy fireplace. Scott’s son, Paul, decided to go outside and investigate the source of Sonny’s unusual barking and irritation.

Perched on the fence, resting, was a Red Shouldered hawk, totally unperturbed by the noise made by the agitated yellow lab. When seeing humans, the seemingly calm bird did not fly from his perch. He sat there motionless for hours, occasionally moving his head, uninterested to fly away in spite of Sonny continued barking.

The hawk perched on the fence.
 

After several hours, Scott decided to call the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fishers (DGIF), asking about this particular hawk. After contacting a raptor rescue, an individual arrived to capture and check the hawk out to make sure he was not injured.

To their surprise, the hawk could not fly away even if he wanted to flee. His wings were indeed damaged, not by another animal, they had been clipped. The hawk got away from his owner who held him captive by clipping his wings. He could not fend for himself but had made it as far as Scott’s back yard fence, causing the commotion with Sonny.

The hawk was very dehydrated and hungry. Caring and safe hands fed him and gave him water. He will be held and cared for until his wing feathers will grow back and he will be able to fly and fend for himself. New feather growth will take about a year and, if able to fly and feed himself, he will be released back into the wild.

Sonny “the rescue dog” saved the beautiful hawk’s life. Without Sonny’s canine instincts, Scott and his family would have never known the terrible condition the raptor was in. While the hawk is being cared for by the Virginia Game and Inland Fisheries, Scott Lingamfelter, a Virginia delegate, will post regular reports on his Facebook page on the hawk’s condition and progress.

Photos by Scott Lingamfelter