Since I have been on this list, I have made a few negative comments about the California Fish and Gestapo. Hell, I've gone out of my way to slander their satanic organization, and take great delight in inventing colorful hyperbole to describe my disguist with their actions towards the domesticated ferret. This has not gone without notice; not just by members of the FML but by outsiders as well, as an encounter I had with a Ca Ca Fish and Gestapo agent proved last year. I once even saw a part of one of my posts enlarged and taped above a professor's desk at Berkeley, and he didn't even have ferrets. I have been publically and privately flamed for my statements about the CaCa Fish and Gestapo, and I know of at least one person who has quit the FML because of them. Oh well. I use political satire to make a point, and am in good company with the likes of Voltaire, Tom Leher, Ben Franklin, and even the good Rabbi Yashua ben Yosef (AKA: Jesus, son of Joseph, the Messiah) who called the religious leaders of his time "corpses" and "snakes" and other equally culturally nasty and religiously unclean things. I figure if the Messiah can call a Jewish religious leader a unclean maggot-riden corpse, then I can say those idiots at Sacramento are full of poop and are acting facist. And they are. The pen is sharper than the sword, and if the CaCa Fish and Gestapo buttslime don't like what I have to say about ecology, they are fully welcome to prove me wrong with science. Or anyone else for that matter; I welcome the challenge, and am fully prepared to admit my scientific mistakes, as long-time readers can already testify towards. But first you have to be able to prove it. Or even support it, and not with century old naturalist memoirs, self-published non-refereed drivel, undergraduate papers unavailable to anyone else, or personal communications that can never be verified. Ecology is a new and exciting field, one which requires deep commitment to gain *any* understanding, and we *all* are just now learning it. The fish and gestapo are locked into a 19th century cultural mindset where animals are resources for hunting, and if predators kill deer that might overwise be hunted by a human, well, for Satan's sake, kill the damn predator. Don't get me wrong; I'm not an ultraliberal activist who belives in protecting all animal life at all costs. I don't think burros belong in Death Valley or the Grand Canyon. I don't think sheep belong on Catalina Island, or wild boar in the California coastal ranges. I don't think cattle belong in alpine meadows. And I don't think ferrets should be running around New Zealand either. In every case, I recommend trapping and relocation or adoption, or even releasing sterilized males, but there are times when depopulation by death is the *only* answer. As for those non-lobed, acerebral cop-wanna-bes that consider their $25 mailorder degree in "Pyschic Biology" the equivent of a PhD degree and 20 years of doing scientific research, I say "Kiss my ferret's poop shooter," you anti-intellectual, morally-dyslexic refugees from humanity who consider ecology one component at a time, because they can't consider anything more complex than a screw, which is what they are doing to every Californian every chance they get, and are being paid to do it. They are the moral equivalent of a diseased, mange-ridden Scotch terrier who insists on "grabbing" your leg in public, the intellectual equal of a maggot dining on buzzard puke, and the democratic embodiment of Stalinist McCarthyism. I hope to whatever your personal religious beliefs may or may not indicate is the equvient of heaven that some day they will wake up, open their eyes, and look for the truth. However, at the present time, all they would notice it was still dark, but perhaps the more astute of them would realize what the smell was. So if anyone wants to reject any of my science posts because I refuse to cowtow to the Ca Ca Fish and Gestapo, go right ahead. If you want to quit the FML because I slander them, I won't fell guilty one tiny little bit. If you want to think of me as an immature sniviling weasel with a Neopolian complex, go right ahead. Until the Ca Ca Fish and Gestapo opens the books and learns something, until they do sound ecological-based studies, and until they pull their heads from the moist recesses of where ever it is and listen to the truth, I will continue my periodic rants, and will take immature and joyful glee in my anti-gestapo hyperbole. "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones, and of everything foul and unclean." "You snakes! You brood of vipers!" Point made. But that's just my opinion, and it may not be yours. Bob C and 20 Mo' Sniviling Weasels [Posted in FML issue 2166]