February 2022: Caught in the Act

The COMPETES Act (H.R. 4521) & The Lacey Act – What are They, and Why Should I Care?

As we all know (or SHOULD know), government is to be limited1. Certain “others” in our country disagree with this premise, as the “Gov” is their primary agent for change (and income). Drawn to endless tax money like bears to an over-flowing dumpster, groups lobby for and/or actively participate in adding amendments into other (often unrelated and voluminous) legislation. Often, one political group will drop in amendments that another political group can’t abide, and it kills the larger legislation - kinda like a virus in the body politic (or rather, the body poly-ticks, as these many blood-suckers endlessly drain taxpayers of cash). Micro amendments are slipped into bigger legislation, with the hope that nobody will notice. And so it is with the extremely vague and short Lacey Act amendment in the COMPETES Act ( H.R. 4521).2 This little bit of legislation seems to innocently limit dangerous, invasive species coming into our country, which (on its face) sounds like a good idea. However, this amendment aims to permanently chain the average American pet hobbyist/breeder to a species “white list” (think federal “permission slip”). How nice of the politicos, giving us a little *pretend* freedom to play with! How did we get here, you may ask? The short answer: very, very slowly, over the last 120 years. American society has been broken down. A once God-fearing, self-sufficient and proud populace that survived two world wars has generationally morphed into to a group of fear-filled, indolent, God-less sheeple. Since LBJ’s “Great Society” went awry in 1968, many Americans now WANT “Mother” government to wrap her razor wire and chain-linked arms around them, to protect them from themselves. Mankind is the most dangerously successful invasive species that ever was, and these days, we generally can’t stand each other (at least, that’s what BLM purports). Bring on that razor wire! American families have been disemboweled (figuratively); driven asunder since the “liberation” of women in the 1970’s. Families have been filleted by 24/7/365 work schedules, two income households desperately trying not to slip from the middle class; children being raised by communistic day care centers and elders sent away to senior death camps – I mean, senior care facilities. Throw in addictions, rising mental illness, processed foods and a lowered standard of living, it’s easy to see that the American family has been drawn and quartered. We’re divided; ready to be conquered and… it gets worse. Although I’ll indelicately state it here, it is nevertheless true: human stupidity world-wide is on the rise.A,C,D Even without progressive (read: communist) schooling dumbing down our children, the next generation is increasingly doomed. Newborn human IQ has dropped 22 points since the Covid-19 lockdown began.3 Adult IQ is dropping as well.4 We are facing a snowball-rolling-downhill of human stupidity, as if the current level of existing stupidity wasn’t bad enough.B So, can Elon Musk give us a fool-proof “Idiocracy5” future before he decamps to Mars? Or maybe we can just legislate stupidity away? Enter the Lacey Act amendment, which attempts to right the wrongs of invasive species by taking away everyone’s freedom (including state’s rights). The Feds want to limit evolution like the gods they think they are, and keep us stupid people in check. But who are the Feds to judge that stupid humans aren’t meant to be agents of evolution in this time and place? After all, God left mankind in charge of all the animals and plants. Once the State was legally separated from God however, it was a natural consequence that the Feds filled that void. Nature abhors a vacuum – am I right? You know I am. And speaking of… me, I am a nano fish farmer. I raise Endler hybrids and Staecks Livebearers – nano fish, for nano aquariums. Although I have only just opened this business in 2021 because I love these animals, I definitely have skin-in-the-game when it comes to the Lacey Act amendment. Over the past 50 years, the fish-keeping hobby has pretty much failed itself. By every pet store selling as many cheap fish as they can get their hands on and marketing fish like toys, the aquarium hobby has been cheapened, and animals abused. Aquarists should have been pro-active and self-policing over the decades, dealing squarely and forcefully with breeders, importers and LFS peddling illegal or potentially harmful livestock, and mishandling animals. The Feds are all up in our biz not for no reason, people! But really, it’s not all on us – not by a long shot. Stupid, selfish people are constantly smuggling illegal livestock and plantstock into our country – mostly as foodstuffs. Last week, I saw a video of crabs that had been smuggled in luggage, running amok on an airport carousel! Crabs, snakeheads, chickens carrying new viruses, even people – the smugglers’ list goes on and on. Let’s not absolve science or big business in our Lacey plight. From “Now I am become Death” Oppinheimer6 to the “the predators will eat them” GloFish developers7, science proves again and again that even the smartest humans are still human, and therefore born to be stupid. Now, little Johnny letting his goldfish go free in the local pond and Suzy shoving her growing pet alligator into the sewer are in the pile of idiots, too – but perhaps more culpable are their parents. Considering how hard the parents work, how little sleep they get, how poorly they’ve been trained to eat and how many IQ points they've lost due to toxic air, water and land - we can at least shed them a tear, for sympathy. But WHY should Americans give in to “white listing” NOW, in 2022? Mankind has been invasively relocating themselves and other species since antiquity. Animals, bugs and plants have been invasively relocating themselves (no humans required) from the dawn of creation! Ancient Pangea rose above the single ocean of earth (where aquatic life was actively spreading). Soon, land animals freely roamed that one soil, eating plants and each other, spreading genes, seeds and disease on their journeys. The breaking apart of Pangea into separate continents, the occasional asteroid hit, lightening strikes, weird weather, pole shifts, ice ages, solar flares, volcanoes, exploding pockets of methane, sinkholes, tar pits or plagues – were not/are not legislated events. Nature dictates evolution. Post-Pangea, it is plausible that wolves invasively spread and evolved while following early hominids, who themselves were invasively spreading and evolving. These wolves would have skirted the hominid camps, looking for scraps of food (cats were said to have been domesticated in a similar way. Invade for the food – stay for idiocy)! Later, humans selected certain camp-following wolves and bred them for desired traits, to create companions, hunters and herders. A Russian experiment8 proves domestication and evolution as bedmates, at least in certain cases. Wild, vicious foxes were caged and farm raised, bred solely for fur type. When the fur trade died, a breeding program began, to see if foxes could be domesticated. The breeders selected foxes with domestication (and not fur coat) in mind. Within a few generations, domestication and diversity of coat were achieved, among other characteristics. Back to evolution by invasive species. The Spanish brought horses, rats, mice, bugs and disease to the Americas. They returned to Spain and brought Aztec gold and tomatoes (invasive plant or foodstuff – or both?) to Europe. English Pilgrims brought more disease (like small pox) and guns to the North Eastern Native American tribes (and later, dispossessed them of their land and killed them). I digress. Movement of men, their animals & plants may be invasive species being invasive, but who is to say that isn’t the way that evolution is supposed to work (besides the Native Americans, who have every right to complain)? Herd immunity implies that large moving groups, not isolated individuals, survive. Oddly and amazingly, plants and animals get sucked up into tornadoes, water spouts, hurricanes, monsoons and tsunamis – and get transported to the strangest places!9 Does that make them invasive? Yes. Animals – including dangerous ones – get accidentally transported when crops are harvested, some of them winding up in supermarkets.10,E Does that make them invasive? Yes! I could go on and on, regaling you with tales of migration and smuggling and accidental stowaways. The point is, no one can regulate all this crazy, except God. The Lacey Act amendment can not effectively regulate invasive species. It will however effectively regulate us stupid people. JUST SAY NO TO THE LACEY ACT AMENDMENT. CALL OR WRITE YOUR SENATOR TODAY AND TELL THEM "NO" TO SPECIES “WHITE LISTING”. LET FREEDOM, GOD AND EVOLUTION REIGN! ________ About the Author: Cheryl Clifton is a Gran’ma GenXer, who’s been in Freshwater Aquatics since 1974. She is literally the poster child for the environmental movement – or one of them, anyway. In 1974, her poster/poem entry was selected as a winner in a Poem & Poetry contest, held by the nascent US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She and the other two selected New Hampshire students were awarded an EPA plaque, and had their photo taken with the then Governor of New Hampshire, Meldrim Thomson. Cheryl continues her interests in Ecology (and other “ologies”) with her study of nature. She is the owner of Screaming Fly Productions, LLC and has a number of projects, among them is PK Endlers.com, a new micro fish farm in New Hampshire, USA. ________ ​ References: 1) https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policy-makers-8th-edition-2017/limited-government-rule-law 2) https://www.reef2rainforest.com/2022/02/04/federal-legislation-threatens-pets-zoos-aquariums-and-biomedical-research/ 3) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/0.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf 4) https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210730/study-finds-covid-19-may-lower-intelligence 5) https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/darwin-dar-lose-the-genius-of-idiocracy-51831/ 6) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/baoppe.html 7) https://www.science.org/content/article/transgenic-glowing-fish-invades-brazilian-streams 8) https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x 9) https://earthsky.org/earth/raining-fish-and-frogs/ 10) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-deadliest-spider-alert-closes-supermarket-in-coventry-england/ A) https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-study-intl/index.html B) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/people-getting-dumber-human-intelligence-victoria-era_n_3293846 C) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31229778/ D) https://newrepublic.com/article/147066/flints-water-crisis-damage-kids-brains E) https://www.insider.com/man-found-frog-in-box-of-lettuce-kept-as-pet-2021-12