- "and the third part of the sea became bloodand the
third part of the creatures which were in the sea and had life, died"
- Revelation, 8:8,9
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- It is perhaps a fitting sign that the worst manmade disaster
in history is visible as a giant sheen of oil and other toxins that is
the color of anemic blood. This floating, bloody sea, which
some say is now the size ofRhode Island and Delaware combined,
is merely a small, surfaced portion of the underwater oil gusher. The
volcanic plumes of oil too heavy to surface are gushing out a mile below
the surface where we cannot see them. They are gushing uncontrolled
from the wound punctured into one of Earth's major oil arteries by British
Petroleum (BP), because BP was drilling in US waters with no disaster plan
on hand. Eleven men died from the initial methane explosions,
and a Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now certain to grow
as oil fills the water and absorbs the oxygen.
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- Why have no arrests been made in this horrifying,
atrocious act of homicidal and environmental negligence? The US should
immediately seize the assets of BP and arrest everyone responsible for
allowing this to happen, including CEOs and US federal employees. Sometimes
it just takes one person to step up and make an announcement of common
sense to get the ball rolling. Here's the announcement: Arrest
the bastards!
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- I state this in part because last week two old geezers
in Florida's Gulf Coast were arrested for growing 100
marijuana plants in the National Forest here. Both elderly gents
now face life sentences. Common sense indicates something is
not quite right here. One atrocity that killed eleven men and
potentially killed the Gulf of Mexico rather seems to dwarf the
other in which nothing and no one was actually harmed. Who hijacked
real justice in the US? Where is justice in 2010? BP
has negligently done something beyond comprehension to theGulf of Mexico because
it was permitted by US government employees to drill so deeply under the
water that no safety measures could even exist, but not a single arrest
has been made. Everyone involved should be arrested and sentenced to cleaning
up this mess that should have been prevented in the first place.
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- The cleanup should include the wildlife, but that is
not going to be easy. It is very difficult to "clean"
a bird or animal that has been coated with toxic crude oil, or has ingested
it or inhaled it. I know this for a fact because I was the founder
of one of the first and largest wildlife rescue and rehabilitation organizations
in US history.
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- I started the organization in 1977 when I realized that
wild animals truly have no voice. When they are injured, orphaned
or starving they have no one to turn to for help because they have no way
of paying for their care in this BP type of world where nothing seems to
matter except money. So, I decided that a couple of my friends
and I would become a voice for wild animals. I announced that
my new group would be providing care, free of charge, for any injured or
orphaned wildlife. We had no money, but sometimes having no
money is not a bad thing at all. It sometimes gives the general
public some motivation to step up and help out with good, innovative ideas
that no one else has given much thought to.
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- I told the public that there would be no salaries for
us, and that if they wanted to help pay for the animals' food and shelter
it would be greatly appreciated. We, in my organization, were
buying food and supplies out of our own pockets. People immediately
responded and they came bearing boxes and boxes and boxes of wild things
that they had found. They finally knew where to bring those
wild things that needed help. They brought crushed turtles they
had found in streets, orphaned animals, countless birds, and everything
else they found. In addition, in knowing where their money was
actually going (food and shelter), the public was very generous in providing
that food and shelter for the animals.
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- At first I was threatened with arrest for providing care
for wildlife without state and federal permits, but that was quickly worked
out and I was eventually given permission to care for everything, including
endangered species. Eventually, officials from Game and Fish
would tell me, "Your group is bigger than Game and Fish. When people
call the Game and Fish Hotline, most of them just want your phone number." When
things work, they work and usually when things work they have a strong
public backing. We had that strong public backing.
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- I stayed with my organization as president until I resigned
(along with half of the board of directors) 18 years later when the other
directors wanted to focus more on raking in money and less on animal care. Appropriate
care for the animals was going downhill. One of the directors,
a Tallahassee lawyer, actually shouted the following question
at me during a phone conversation: "What's more important,
getting $40,000 from the City of Tallahassee, or a bunch of goddamn
raccoons?" I said, "The raccoons." It
was time for me to move on.
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- During my years of caring for wild animals, in which
I neither asked for nor received any salary, I personally cared for over
20,000 wild birds and wild animals, including many hundreds of the Gulf Coast's
brown pelicans. The pelicans were endangered when I first began
caring for them, but they have since enjoyed a brief time off the endangered
species list. I'm not sure what their fate will now be in the
wake of the catastrophe caused by BP, Transocean and Halliburton.
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- My children, Emily and John, were born here in Tallahassee,
and they spent their childhood years with a unique understanding of nature,
and a respect for it. My children lived in a household where
it was not unusual to see a tiny orphaned fawn on the sun porch waiting
for his next bottle of milk, pelicans standing on garden hoses in blue
kiddy pools in the back yard making soft "hoo, hoo, hoo" breath
noises to each other (the only sound that pelicans can make), raccoons,
beaver, otter, bear cubs, hawks, eagles, owls, gulls, opossums, turtles,
bunnies, squirrels, sparrows and songbirds of every size and wonderful
color.
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- These wild animals would all be housed in the back yard
for a little while as we gave them food and care until they were ready
to be released again back into the wild. We were never injured
by any of them. The wildlife all seemed to "know"
that we were here to help them, and that they had somehow had the good
fortune of being reacquainted with obvious relatives although we humans
could not run, hop, swim or fly as well as they could. They
were content to accept us as their parents, despite our human shortcomings. They
came to us when we were unable to go to them. They didn't mind.
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- I released most of our wild birds and animals at the
St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge and Alligator Point, both located on
the Gulf Coast. A number of the birds found their
way back to my house, however, sometimes arriving back here before I arrived
back traveling by car. It seems that birds take their relationships
with humans rather seriously.
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- They remained in the wild, up in the neighborhood trees,
but would sometimes acknowledge me by flying down and paying a visit with
their new offspring which oddly enough resembled them rather than me. Some
of the offspring of the wrens and blue jays that I released in my own neighborhood
apparently still recognize me as the one who (according to bird legend)
is the human from whom their great-grandmothers came.
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- In time, I was eventually honored by various Native American
People, including the Lakota, Cheyenneand Apache, and I received gifts
of eagle feathers as well as sacred Pipes. I received one Pipe
from the sixth generation grandson of Sitting Bull. My own great-grandfather
was Narragansett or from the Five Nations. We are not sure. But
the Pipe from Sitting Bull's grandson joined me at the heart to the Lakota
People. The eagle feathers were a great honor, but unfortunately
I was unable to keep them except in my memory.
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- Most people do not realize that it is illegal for any
American to be in possession of a feather of any migratory bird in the US unless
the federal government has determined that you might be allowed to have
a permit for such feather possession. Anyone found to be in
possession of a single migratory bird feather without permission can be
arrested, fined thousands of dollars and placed in federal prison. Again
I ask, where is the real justice in the US when this federal
government allows a foreign country to come into our sovereign waters and
possibly destroy much of the Gulf of Mexico for the sake of making
money, when this government imprisons its own citizens for being in possession
of a single bird feather?
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- My children probably do not remember my "great pelican
rescues" when Arctic cold fronts ripped down through the US and hovered
over the Gulf of Mexico freezing many pelicans solid as they stood on the
sands, and sending their surface food fish swimming off into deeper and
warmer waters. When the first Arctic cold front arrived, my
group had approximately $11.80 in our checking account. The
fishermen along the Gulf phoned me and told me that the pelicans were starving
and were suffering from frostbite so severe that their feet and pouches
were falling off.
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- The fishermen told me that they, the fishermen,
had been trying to feed the pelicans, but that the fishermen's source of
fish had also disappeared due to the terrible freeze. I could
not believe what they were telling me at first, but when I made the trip
to the Gulf, I was horrified by what I saw. I saw the pelicans
with no feet, and with no pouches. I saw the gaunt fishermen
who were also hungry and feeding what was left of their supply of fish
to the pelicans, sometimes putting the fish into the necks of the pelicans
that no longer had pouches.
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- I went into fish houses along the Gulf and saw the pelicans
lined up in calm, single lines on the docks. The fishermen had converted
barrels into wood burning stoves in the fish houses to provide warmth. The
pelicans stood calmly at the open doorways awaiting their turn and one-by-one
they walked in, sat in front of the heaters until they were warmed, and
then they walked outside sometimes with a "hoo, hoo, hoo," allowing
the next pelican in line to come and sit in front of the fire.
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- This was a time for another announcement. I
released a press statement saying "We are going to provide food for
every starving pelican from the local Florida coastline to Louisiana." When
I was asked by the press how much money we had to do this, I replied, "$11.80." I
was asked how this operation was going to be possible, and I replied "I
don't know, but we're going to do it." And, that was when
the miracle happened. I didn't create the miracle. I only made
the announcement that something was going to happen. The general
public then stepped forward and created the miracle.
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- Overnight, I received thousands of dollars for pelican
food, and within 24 hours I received 15,000 pounds of frozen fish from
a large fishing operation. The money did not come in large dominations,
but it came from individuals, according to what they could afford to give. Some
could only afford one or two dollars, some five or ten. I was
very moved to receive an envelope from a child. The envelope
contained four quarters. "This is my allowance for this
week," the child wrote. "Please use it to feed the pelicans.
And tell them I love them."
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- Everyone seemed to be suddenly empowered to make a change
and they came forward and came together and we all worked hand in hand
with the fishermen in order to save the brown pelicans. I will
never forget this. I have never seen anything like it in my
life. At one point I was told by one of my volunteers down at
the coast, "The fishermen are also hungry. Can they have some of the
pelicans' fish?" I said yes, give the fish to anyone or
anything that is hungry. In this way, it would be the voiceless
pelicans that in fact saved everyone and everything starving along the
coast. And, I told that volunteer, "Look the other way. Don't
humiliate the hungry fishermen if they need to take some fish home to feed
their families." It was the fishermen who sounded the warning
about the plight of the pelicans. No one who did such a brave
thing should go to bed hungry.
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- Again, I was threatened with arrest by an overzealous
government agent zooming around in a motor boat. He did not
want me "touching" the brown pelicans that were opening their
mouths like babies when they saw me coming hoping that I would be putting
food into their mouths. It seems that the birds understood
the nature of this rescue mission better than the government employees. I
told the man that my elderly father and I (and I was nine months pregnant
at the moment) were going to transport those pelicans that had no pouches
back to my house and triage area where they would receive veterinary care.
Eventually BF Goodrich attempted to make rubber pouches for the pelicans,
but those prostheses never worked. The lower mandibular bone
(rami) of the pelican is a flexible structure, bowing outward when the
bird dives to capture fish. We were unable to find a way to
secure the prostheses to the bowing rami. The pelicans without
pouches would need to be handfed by humans every single day for the rest
of their lives by placing the fish into the birds' esophagi.
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- This resulted in new threats of my arrest because the
"officials" wanted the pelicans that could not be released to
be killed. I announced that this was against my principles,
I was not going to kill anything, and that we were going to allow the pelicans
to make more pelicans. After all, they were endangered. It
made clear sense to me. I eventually sent a number of the permanently
injured brown pelicans over to Louisiana and down into south Florida where
they would be allowed to replenish their species and all of the pelicans
knew that each day they would need to come and open their mouths so that
humans could place their daily food into their necks. The plan
worked.
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- It is not only wild animals in dire need of help that
will readily enter into friendship with humans. Those needing
no help at all will sometimes reach out just to have fun, as I will describe. The
fact that Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is still revered as the "father
of modern philosophy," indicates that modern philosophy got off to
a bad start a long time ago when Rene decided that animals were nothing
more than machines with moving parts and whirring cogs that some have compared
to cuckoo clocks.
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- Descartes felt animals were capable of complex, cog-like
movements, but he decided that animals had no minds. Only humans
had minds, thought Descartes, and he therefore concluded that animals could
feel no pain. This led Descartes to become a pioneer in the stoic field
of vivisection. Since this was "accepted," it is no
wonder why people are still treating animals without respect, despoiling
their waters and forests without a single thought of regret. With
such an outdated "father" blazing an archaic path backwards for
us all in philosophy, it is perhaps understandable how people have come
to believe that money is far more important than "goddamn" animals. It
was possibly the Descartes' philosophy of "animals have no minds"
that instead turned people into mindless machines. And, it was
perhaps no coincidence at all that at the same time when I learned of Descartes'
philosophy about animals, I met a pod of cuckoo clocks down at the beach
one afternoon.
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- John and Emily and I had gone to Alligator Point for
a picnic. It is frequently a "busy" beach, with lots
of people enjoying it fishing, swimming, volley ball, sun bathing,
eating, drinking beer, and enjoying boiled peanuts. After lunch, we left
our blankets, towels and cooler of sodas, juice and ice on the sand and
we ventured out into the Gulf's shallow waters. We were standing
in the cool, lapping, salt water that was hardly above our ankles when
for reasons no one can explain a pod of dolphins came up to us, beached
themselves at our feet, and one of them rolled over exposing his white,
pearly underbelly. Dolphins have a perpetual smile on their
faces for a reason, and I personally think that Descartes' cogs and pistons
were not firing properly. Dolphins like to have fun.
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- Emily looked at me with her eyes wide, "Mom, what
is happening?" I answered that I did not know but that
I thought they were just reaching out in a gesture of friendship. I
told the kids to speak gently to them, but not to make sudden movements
or touch them. The dolphins seemed to enjoy the gentle speech that then
issued from my children. In a flash, the pod of dolphins
turned around and sped back into deep waters and John and Emily began jumping
up and down and waving at them. The dolphins apparently liked
this, too, because they immediately turned around and came back and beached
themselves again at the kids' feet. This caused the kids to
break out in hysterical laughter. The dolphins liked this too
and there was a great deal of head bobbing and splashing. A
woman on the beach came up to me and asked me if these dolphins belonged
to us. I explained that I had never seen them before today. She
looked perplexed, and so I told her something that I learned when I visited
the Hopi Indians and asked them why unexplainable things sometimes happen. The
Hopi answered that if it's happening, it must be normal. I told
the woman, "This is normal."
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- For the next three hours, Emily, John and the pod of
dolphins played up and down the beach, with the dolphins swimming far away
and then swimming back to my children's feet when the kids called out to
them. Scores of people followed my children up and down the beach
in order to watch as John and Emily called the dolphins back again and
again. Some of the people filmed this memorable event. It was
a day never to be forgotten, a moment of time when a pod of dolphins seemed
to be saying without words, "Remember me. Remember us." Of
course, we all would.
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- And so, when the dead dolphins began washing up on the
Gulf beaches last week, I felt a wrench where my heart is and I wondered
if those dead bodies were our smiling friends. They had spent
a day having fun with humans, and now I wondered if they had perished by
the hand of humans through the methane explosions, the plumes of toxic
oil and gas, and the 400,000 gallons of "secret" toxic dispersants
being dumped into the Gulf experimentally by BP. The waters
of the US Gulf are on fire in places, and British Petroleum is mindlessly
adding more "secret" toxins to the waters they have already poisoned,
and no one is stopping them. No one has been arrested yet for
this carnage, none of which was necessary. It is time
for more than mere arrests. It is time for a Revolution, and
this time not a single shot will need to be fired. All that
needs to be heard around the world are the quiet words of one young man. His
name is John Shaw. He is my son.
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- John is 24 years old and he is running for a seat in
the Florida Senate. He is no longer the little boy who, along
with his sister, was selected by the dolphins as a playmate from among
an entire beach filled with people. I think, however, the dolphins
would select him again. In fact, I feel that something very
strange and synchronistic is happening at this time. Perhaps
it was the dolphins who selected John to run for the Senate. "Remember
me. Remember us." John's platform is to
bring about the legalization of industrial hemp.
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- Hemp is one of the most successful, useful and easily
grown crops in all of human history. In addition to being a
source of nontoxic medication (proven to cure cancer, including brain cancer),
producing superb textiles, paper, and plastics stronger than steel, hemp
is also a rich source of clean, nontoxic, renewable, sustainable oil. Hemp
was made illegal in 1937 in order to bolster the petroleum industry. Humanity
was not always dependent upon petroleum. We became dependent
upon it when large corporations removed other cleaner, and more appropriate
choices from us. They removed our choices through legislation
that created laws banning petroleum's competition. This is in
violation of American antitrust laws.
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- John, who has a passionate belief in the US Constitution
and for limiting state and federal intrusion into people's lives, feels
we should have intelligent choices. He would like to see fewer
laws and more freedom for people. He would like to see hemp
legalized again and he would like to see it grown as a source of fuel oil.
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- At this time, John has no campaign money (I know this
to be a fact because I am his campaign treasurer). He is perhaps
the only politician campaigning in the entire US at this time without any
money, but after long discussions and much laughter, we have concluded
that perhaps this is how it should be. He is certainly not going
to be receiving funding from the multi-billion dollar petroleum industry
which usually pads the pockets of Gulf Coast politicians. He
will not be receiving funding from the timber industry, because hemp can
easily and quickly replace timber. He won't be receiving funds
from the cotton industry, because hemp is much better than cotton. He's
not going to be receiving funding from The Mosaic Company, one of the largest
companies in the US, because John already knows that water fluoridation
using phosphate fertilizer waste is another archaic and bad idea that needs
to be ended. In fact, John won't be receiving funding from any
major industry that I can think of because he's not campaigning to provide
support for industries. He's campaigning to bring about real
change the kind of change that no one else has had the guts to truly
address.
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- As I have said, though, having no money is sometimes
a good thing because it tends to empower the general public to rethink
things and then come forward and act as individuals. As you
know, I have seen it happen before.
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- It's time for a change. We need to listen
to young minds with fresh, clean new ideas and part company with poor,
outdated ideas that are destroying the earth and humanity as well. When
John first started campaigning two years ago for a seat in the House of
Representatives, he included in his platform the end of the so-called "War
on Drugs," with special emphasis on the value of our utilization once
again of industrial hemp as a viable and easily grown cash crop. His
platform as he now runs for Senate is specifically focused on reintroducing
industrial hemp into US industry as a source of fuel.
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- This person who was selected by the dolphins is again
trying to speak to us about the common sense of growing hemp throughout
the US rather than relying upon petroleum. John
Shaw's revolutionary words need to be heard now, just like that shot once
heard around the world.
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- _____
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- Mary Sparrowdancer is an internationally published book
author, an independent investigative journalist, and a columnist for Jeff
Rense, at Rense.com. If you would like to see her once again begin caring
for wildlife, please let her know.
- Sparrowdancer1@earthlink.net
- www.sparrowdancer.com
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- Mary's son, John Shaw, is running for a seat in the Florida
Senate and he is trying to bring about true change in government. John
needs $1,781.82 by June 18, 2010 in order to place his name on the ballot,
although money should not ever be needed to run for office. If
you can afford a dollar or two to put his name on the ballot, thank you.
Please send here:
- http://www.johnshaw.org/donations.htm
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- Contact information:
- Email: john@johnshaw.org
- Phone: 850-566-7013
- Website: http://www.johnshaw.org,
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- Mary's daughter, Emily Shaw, is currently a Reserve
Deputy Sheriff, meaning that she is sworn to uphold the Constitution, and
she performs her work for the community as a Deputy Sheriff without any
compensation at all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2GwJ3qyLI
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- References
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- BP CEO: Oil Spill "tiny," Gulf is
big.
- http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/05/bp_chief_oil_spill_is_relative.html
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- Rene Descartes
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/whales/man/comm.html
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- Secret Oil Dispersants
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-shannon/why-are-dispersant-chemic_b_575741.html
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- John Shaw Roasted at the Tiger Bay Club
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_iFYAQT1V8
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