Nope - there’s nothing bubble-like about the current state. Note that the scale there is so large that the current mass-extinction doesn’t show up - but your own cite says :
So my lying eyes are deceiving me, and that entire slope in my link* isn’t* covered by precisely *one *species of invasive plant? If there was only 2 species in the Maquis before that, that would be a reduction of 100% - and I assure you, there were many more species in there than that. So I don’t believe your cite. I believe my own experience withinvasives, thanks.
Was the word “between” supposed to open that sentence?
And…Holy Hannah! I honestly didn’t know there were 140,000 species in existence, let alone that this many could become extinct in a single year! Does this count individual lines of bacteria or something?
(Always remembering Haldane and God’s inordinate fondness for beetles…)
How terrifying are these numbers? Is there any baseline on how many species become extinct in the course of a year in “natural” circumstances, which is to say, absent humans and comets? No extinction is “good” or “welcome,” but some will be inevitable, just by the course of non-directed competition among species with very limited habitats. (A local species of blind cavern fish could be extinguished by a cave-in.)
(Compare it, perhaps, to forest fires. There were always fires in nature – from lightning strikes, mostly – but humans have increased the number significantly.)
Whoops, yes: “Scientists estimate that between 20,000 and 2 million species went extinct during the 20th century…”
Yes. It’s called the “Background Extinction Rate” and AFAIK, it doesn’t generally include bacteria, no :). Opinions vary as to what it actually exactly is, but “experts agree” the current rate is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than it (but that’s WWF saying it, not any scientific cite). The usual/default rough number I’m familiar with is 1 species per million species per year based on the fossil record.
Please don’t try to tell the rest of the world that the butthurt musings of some engineer/pilot represents a textbook lesson in US Constitutional law.
Your cite notes that “thousands” of flights are monitored every day. Of those, less than 500 so far this year attracted scrutiny. Of those, 25 were actually contacted. And 8 revealed violations of law or regulation. Hardly a nightmare of over-reach, IMHO.
Also note that these 25 contacts were requests for permission to search. That is quite different from an “unconstitutional search”. As said so many times already, law enforcement may ask permission to search pretty much any time they want to. A citizen does not have to grant permission. That refusal can only be over-ridden by law enforcement under certain clearly defined circumstances. None of which apply in routine agricultural border inspections.
Neither are those planes being searched for no reason. The reference there is meant to be an insufficiently legitimate and specific reason. The same rationale behind searching every car (or any car they like) as they enter California can be applied to searching for drugs or other contraband. But the fundamental nature of our Bill of Rights is that you can’t just do general sweeps, no matter how effective it would be in finding said contraband.
You and Dan respond as though this were a legal argument, and attack this pilot’s credentials to make such. I do think there is one to be made; but I quoted that article to illustrate the deep cultural significance of the protection against warrantless search and seizure, specifically within cars.
But in legal terms, the Supreme Court ruled not long ago that police could not even attach trackers to the outside of cars. Why you would expect them to reverse course when talking about searching the inside of cars, I don’t know.
To be precise - that’s 400,000 described species. Estimates vary but somewhere between 70%-95% remain undescribed, So just beetles can net you 4 million species total. And they represent 30% of all animals, so do the maths…12 million at least. And I’m sure that’s way lowball - there’s estimated to be a million nematode species alone, for instance.
…and are you ever going to address the other things you are wrong about, like that marine species can’t be invasive? Or is it just to be a Gish Gallop from here on in? Ever onwards and upwards, and always twirling, twirling, twirling…
SlackerInc, you’ve made it a legal issue by citing the Bill of Rights and your constant references to warrantless searches. And you are still wrong about this matter, just as you are wrong about so much of biology. No warrantless searches are being conducted by California agricultural inspectors, nor the ag inspectors of the other states. Searches are performed after securing the permission of the car’s operator. There is no violation of anyone’s Constitutional rights, despite all your “cultural significance” BS. No court is going to intervene or stop this practice, despite all your special pleading and your false analogies.
No one is forced to submit to a warrantless search of their car before entering California. Nor is anyone required or forced to cross the state line. And the option to cross remains open even if you deny permission to search your vehicle. It’s just that you won’t be bringing your car, or even your luggage, across the line unless the ag inspectors are confident that no contraband is contained within them. California retains the sovereign right to deny entry to certain materials including certain life forms that it judges constitute a threat to its citizens. You either demonstrate that you are not secreting such about your person or your effects, or your effects are denied entry. This should be simple enough for anyone to understand. Please don’t make me repeat it to you yet again.
Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan…nothing more amusing than someone who sneers from an incorrect position.
Mm-hmm. No barrier to entry at all, as long as you are willing to abandon your car and your luggage and walk. (Though I’m not sure it’s legal to walk on the freeway, but anyway.) This is the kind of creepy reasoning behind Jim Crow era voting laws: in some tortured theoretical way, blacks still had a right to vote. Judges can see right through this nonsense, I assure you.
But let’s take a look at a 7-2 SCOTUS decision from just 15 years ago, shall we?
USCourts.gov says the following about the Fourth Amendment and vehicular searches (emphases mine):
Agricultural checkpoints are not discussed there, but the strong implication, from what they do describe as being allowed and not allowed, is that this would not pass constitutional muster. Hopefully, it will soon turn out to be like the prayer said at my high school graduation: I grumbled that “I can’t believe this isn’t unconstitutional”, and two years later the Supreme Court indeed ruled it so.
No, it is not specific to the vehicle being searched. It’s a general sweep. General sweeps are crackerjack at finding contraband; but they violate our essential civil liberties. Can you articulate how finding fruit pests is so much more important than catching smugglers, kidnappers, etc.? I don’t believe you fundamentally support the Fourth Amendment, which is a position; it’s just not one I share.
Says Mr. “I don’t believe your cite, because it does not align with my preset beliefs and the anecdotal evidence I see in my yard.” Pffft.
ETA: Dibble, I just noticed you are in South Africa. Unless you are an American expat, I don’t much care what you think about our Bill of Rights, honestly.
Son of a badger! I knew (Haldane) that there were tons of beetles, but… Wow!
The higher overall number of species, alas, doesn’t make me feel any better about the high current rates of extinctions. I would say that protecting habitat and preventing habitat loss is a lot higher a priority than cleansing areas of non-native species.
A eucalyptus forest is a damn sight better than no forest at all…
To be fair, the count (both for total species and number of extinctions) is inflated by any number of “this beetle/fish/bird is almost exactly like that one except for this minute difference, new species !”
God might be inordinately fond of beetles but she’s also a small incremental changes buff.
Depends. Is your house near the eucalyptus forest ? Bonus question, can you get a fire insurance salesman to stop laughing hysterically when you talk to them about your house near the eucalyptus forest ?
Because “fruit” are a much more generally conveyed contraband than drugs.
Because I’m sure the economic benefits of the fruit farming industry to California are several orders of magnitude larger than the detriments of smugglers.
I think the Fourth Amendment is a great thing, actually. I’m just not going to be some kind of fundamentalist when it comes to deciding what’s “reasonable”
That shit don’t grow in my yard. But I have spent several summers clearing that monospecific shit out of our watersheds, yes. so forgive me if I don’t believe an opinion piece over what my own Biodiversity Institute and my own experience tells me.
And I don’t much care what you don’t much care about. Especially when you still haven’t responded to, you know, actually refutations of scientific points you were wrong about, like the inability of marine species to be invasive. When you have the basic facts wrong, I’m not even going to trust that you can actually read the damn Fourth, much less understand the jurisprudence involved.
“Survival of the Fittest” is not a prescriptive principle. It’s not a moral imperative. It’s a (kind of misleading) description of one (just one) of several aspects of Darwinian evolution.
Protecting biodiversity, otoh, is a matter not only of protecting future resources but of being able to do direct science on them.
Of course, you’re an environmentalist, while I’m a conservationist. We will not always agree.
The two go hand-in-hand, actually. Clearing non-native plant species is a big part of preventing habitat loss. Native plant species effectively are the habitat, and that’s what the invasives replace.
Only to a Koala.
To most animals that’re adapted to live in e.g. Afromontane Podocarpus forest, a Eucalyptus plantation may as well be Antarctica or the Namib. There’s nothing you’re used and adapted to eating and a lot of that invasive shit is actively poisonous to you. And actively attracting fires to kill you off that way.
SlackerInc, your self-proclaimed expertise in the law is hollow to the level of ridiculousness and your confident proclamations on constitutionality sound foolish. Lawyers and laws are all about straining at gnats and swallowing camels, so your analogies are inapplicable to the actual case at hand. Whatever “strong implication” you see, and however “hopefully” you rely on future decisions, the fact remains that you have offered not a single instance of agricultural inspections being over-ruled on constitutional grounds. Please offer an on-point cite showing that the agricultural inspections of any state have been declared unconstitutional, or stop proclaiming them to be so.
Further, I cannot decide if your profound misunderstanding of biology is merely unfortunate ignorance or deliberate rejection of reality. Contrary to what your own self confidence seems to tell you, your opinions are insufficient to overcome the weight of evidence and/or the expressed opinions of actual experts.
Until such time as this thread becomes a discussion relying on genuine facts and not a circular round of factual cites by others being rebuffed by your unsupported opinions, I’ll just bow out. You bore me.
Which is always the case with anything until it *is *so ruled. Until 2003, laws against gay sex (“sodomy”) had not been found unconstitutional (in fact, they had explicitly been ruled constitutional in 1986). You could have blustered to the same effect about those laws in 2002 if you were so inclined. My assertion is, and continues to be, that these searches *are *unconstitutional by any reasonable reading of the Fourth Amendment and the precedent of its application, and will hopefully eventually be specifically ruled as such.
Classic. Translation: “I was humiliatingly schooled, so I will withdraw and declare victory.” Pfffffffft.
