There is no bad guy in this.

Activists and advocates for homeless people everywhere in the United States opine ever-tightening legal strictures regarding ‘sharing food’ in public — how feeding houseless people is classified under the law.

According to Georgia State University Police Sgt. Corrigan, a chaplain and head of the department’s homeless outreach, and a plethora of detractors, giving people food serves an acute need, but does little if anything to solve the twin crises of hunger and shelterlessness in the long term — even exacerbating such issues as left-behind refuse, communicable disease, lack of sanitation and restrooms, and more, if allowed to continue.

Indeed, as the AP reports, “About 40 cities nationwide had active laws to restrict food sharing as of November 2014, and a few dozen more had attempted such restrictions, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Interim Director Megan Hustings said she doesn’t have updated numbers but that she’s heard about more cities considering such regulations.”

However, The Nation painted a more appropriately dismal if albeit embarrassing picture on the status of feeding houseless people — nearly three years ago, in February 2015 — reporting,

“According to a survey of more than 180 cities by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, anti-homeless laws pervade urban spaces nationwide. Roughly a third of cities barred public ‘camping,’ for example, up 60 percent since 2011. Restrictions range from prohibiting sitting on sidewalks to imposing steep fees or regulations that effectively criminalize actions of charity groups, often using antiseptic ‘quality of life’ terms (a tent pitched under a bridge becomes an unauthorized ‘camp’). Palo Alto has banned sleeping in parked cars. Mobile has imposed zero-tolerance on ‘aggressive panhandling,’ which could involve just ‘request[ing] a donation from a person standing in line…no matter how mildly the request was made.’ Last year, ThinkProgress reported, Fort Lauderdale authorized police to bust people who ‘store possessions’ on public property — suggesting that homeless people don’t deserve to have what little they carry with them, let alone ‘quality of life.’”

Notably, it isn’t as if these cities have implemented far-reaching and successful programs to replace the lost assistance of do-gooders.

In essence, critics of public charitable food-giving adhere to two problematic mainstays of thought: that people must ‘pull themselves up by the bootstraps’; but, failing that, ‘teaching them to fish’ — pointing them in the direction of assistance and having them enroll, for example, in return for food — rather than simply ‘giving them fish,’ is the only valid means of assisting the neediest of individuals.

Our way or no way, they seem to suggest. There is no bad guy in this.

“We don’t want anybody to stop feeding people. We just want it done in a way that’s connected to social services providers,” George Chidi, social impact director for nonprofit community development organization, Central Atlanta Progress, averred to the Associated Press, “and not on the street corner because we can’t make sure those connections are being made in these street corner feedings.”

Thus, Atlanta joins a shamefully lengthening list of cities choosing to declare a de facto war not only against the condition of being homeless, but against anyone willing to offer the stopgap assistance of an immediate meal.

Case in point, volunteer Adele MacLean with Food Not Bombs — who takes issue with the whole of Chidi’s position — landed a citation and court summons from another University of Georgia law enforcement officer on November 19, after the awareness and advocacy group refused to cease feeding houseless people in a downtown park when threats to obtain a permit were ignored. Although the offense was ultimately tossed by a judge, she feels the incident and the fallacious premise of her supposed transgression symptomatic of the crackdown on homelessness, telling the AP,

“Food is a human right, and you don’t force people to do what you want them to do by withholding food.”

Atlanta and other cities added to obstacles between houseless people and those who would provide them nourishment, predicating any immediate assistance on their entrée into the impoverishment assistance complex — while simultaneously frustrating activists and advocates with a deluge of impossible red tape making the act of sharing food a laborious chore for those attempting to work within its confines.

Indeed, shady tactics apparently land within the purview of enforcing the law.

According to the AP, attorneys for MacLean say police have gone so far as to disseminate a “misleading pamphlet” emblazoned with the city seal and a statement indicating a permit is required to feed homeless people in public — but it isn’t true. A previously unenforced county law exists, notes Reason — which only saw enforcement beginning around Thanksgiving — but none does explicitly for the City of Atlanta.

Southern Center for Human Rights attorney Gerry Weber, representing MacLean, explained restaurants, food trucks, and festival vendors may indeed require permits from the city — people voluntarily sharing food in public without charge, not so much.

Food Not Bombs was forced to challenge a similarly callous ordinance in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, arguing before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August such crackdowns on feeding houseless people infringe on the group’s constitutional right to free speech, since members share food “as an expression of their political message that hunger and poverty can be ended if society’s resources are redirected from the military and war.”

A decision in the matter has yet to be rendered.

In the interim, charity workers advocating for homeless people in cities across this putatively Great (or, perhaps, Getting There) nation will have to contend with an ambivalent public, ludicrous restrictions, and an eagerly authoritarian body of law enforcement in order to give hungry people food in a public setting.

“I salute genuinely the good will and good nature of all these people,” Sgt. Corrigan insisted to the Associated Press.

“There is no bad guy in this.”

Image: Public domain.

Such as ongoing analysis and the government’s latest assessment of four neonicotinoid pesticides (often referred to for brevity as ‘neonics’), two of which, EPA scientists conclude, directly threaten not only indispensable pollinators like bees and butterflies, but birds, aquatic life, other insects, and some small mammals, as well.

“The EPA’s assessments confirm neonicotinoid pesticides are extremely harmful to birds and aquatic life at the very center of our ecosystems,” asserted Center for Biological Diversity director of environmental health program, Lori Ann Burd, in a statement Friday. “With bird, aquatic invertebrate and bee populations in decline, the only way to prevent further catastrophic damage is to follow Europe’s lead and ban these dangerous pesticides.”

Dangerous, to say the least, in terms of impact to ecosystems and the broader environment — but, in particular, to the species and pollinators responsible for much of the nation’s agricultural acreage.

“In today’s assessment the EPA found that risks posed to certain birds from eating neonic-treated seeds exceeded the agency’s level of concern — the level at which harm is known to occur — by as much as 200-fold,” the Center for Biological Diversity statement continues. “In addition to killing birds, a recent scientific study also found, neonic pesticides significantly impair the migratory ability of seed-eating songbirds.

“Today’s analysis found that if neonic-treated seeds make up just 1 percent to 6 percent of a bird’s diet, serious harms could result.”

As Burd and the Center note, similar results abroad led the European Union to institute a temporary ban on neonics, while agency regulating pesticides in Canada recommended a ban for one of the most widely used neonicotinoids due to depredation of aquatic life — yet, these sobering findings from the government agency putatively tasked with protecting the environment do not necessarily secure a ban in the United States.

“The EPA’s own research leaves no question that neonicotinoids pose unacceptable risks,” the environmental health expert opined. “But while other developed nations wisely restrict use of these dangerous poisons, the United States has refused to take even the most basic steps to protect our wildlife from neonics.”

Four neonicotinoid pesticides — clothianidin, thiamethoxam, dinotefuran, and imidacloprid — are under investigation by the EPA after a growing body of evidence pegs the insidious substances responsible for sharply declining honey bee, butterfly, and other pollinator populations, as well as slumps in numbers of endangered species, in the U.S. and overseas.

But it’s the latter, imidacloprid, which is of exceptional concern to environmentalists and vigilant scientists — posing an “acute risk,” finds the EPA, to bird populations when sprayed directly onto crops. Indeed, the pernicious substances also threaten birds and animals eating neonic-treated seeds — which is one common method of delivery to treat plants, like cotton, with these pesticides.

“Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides known to have both acute and chronic effects on honeybees, birds, butterflies and other pollinator species, and they are a major factor in overall pollinator declines,” the CBD press statement from December 15 explains. “These systemic insecticides cause entire plants, including pollen and fruit, to become toxic to pollinators; they are also slow to break down and therefore build up in the environment.”

And, as Truthout notes, “In 2016, the EPA also found that imidacloprid ‘potentially poses risk to [bee] hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators,’ according to a preliminary assessment released at the time.”

This November, Futurism reported on a stunning analysis of two of the world’s most popular pesticides, the neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, and the organophosphate, chlorpyrifos — widely suspected of causing brain and nerve damage, and in a class of substances which indeed do, although the assertion remains technically unproven — a long-temporarily banned pesticide removed from consideration for permanent prohibition by Trump EPA-appointee, Scott Pruitt, in March 2017, under highly suspect circumstances.

“Studies on the risks of neonicotinoids have often focused on bees that have been experiencing population declines. However, it is not just bees that are being affected by these insecticides,” Christy Morrissey, a biology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, warned in a press release announcing the study, at the time of publication.

Post-doctoral fellow and leader of that research team, Margaret Eng, added, “These chemicals are having a strong impact on songbirds. We are seeing significant weight loss and the birds’ migratory orientation being significantly altered. Effects were seen from eating the equivalent of just three to four imidacloprid treated canola seeds or eight chlorpyrifos granules a day for three days.”

She noted that although recovery from the effects was possible, “the effects we saw were severe enough that the birds would likely experience migratory delays or changes in their flight routes that could reduce their chance of survival, or cause a missed breeding opportunity.”

Futurism elaborated on the findings, “The insecticides have devastating and quick-acting effects on songbirds. They lost up to 25% of both their body mass and fat stores in addition to becoming lethargic and not eating as much (both signs of acute poisoning). They also became confused when attempting to migrate, unable to successfully orient themselves.”

Yet, the Trump administration’s EPA appears less than reluctant to allow the prolific use of all of the aforementioned pesticides.

In fact, just before press time, the Center for Biological Diversity issued yet another media statement pertaining to neonicotinoids, specifically in re, thiamethoxam, whose application for expanded use was surreptitiously slipped into the Federal Register on Friday — altogether unannounced by the dubious Environmental Protection Agency. Should the application garner approval, the substance — currently allowed to be applied as a seed coating — would be sprayed directly onto food crops, as well.

“For years the EPA and pesticide companies bragged that by using treated seeds they were avoiding spraying insecticides, and despite the science showing that these treated seeds were deadly to birds, claimed that they were environmentally beneficial,” Burd averred. “But we can expect the Trump EPA to now ignore the risks to birds and bees and approve these ultra-toxic pesticides to be sprayed across hundreds of millions of U.S. acres.”

Neonicotinoids indeed remain under ostensive review by the agency, with a determination to be delivered within the next two years.

While waiting without bated breath for government agencies to render verdict for or against an immense and ballooning body of scientific research admonishing of the dangers of neonicotinoids, consider the altogether ominous concluding thought from the Center’s newest press release — and the potentially tragic ramifications of erstwhile flippant, myopic decisions,

“A large and growing body of independent science links neonicotinoids to catastrophic bee declines. Twenty-nine independent scientists who conducted a global review of more than 1,000 independent studies on neonicotinoids found overwhelming evidence linking the pesticides to declines in populations of bees, birds, earthworms, butterflies and other wildlife.”

Image: Siam Teewareecharouen/Shutterstock.

That sum is indeed $21 trillion — tens of trillions of dollars — spent by the DoD and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on … well, no one really knows what.

Not just that, but this rather bewildering amount slipped through cracks in only seventeen years — from 1998, the year legislation passed mandating annual audits of every government agency, through 2015.

Michigan State University Professor of Economics Mark Skidmore, who specializes in public finance, authored the study, which became his brainchild after hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, remark on a report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealing no less than $6.5 trillion unaccounted for, but spent, by the DoD.

Skidmore, flabbergasted, had presumed from experience with previous public financing matters the astronomical figure too high not to be a mistake.

“Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don’t have adequate transactions,” he explained of what typically happens when funds aren’t accounted for, in an interview in early December, “so an auditor would just recede. Usually it’s just a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that you just can’t account for.”

Except, the erstwhile ‘missing’ monies didn’t total in the billions, and Skidmore soon confirmed the preposterous sum published in the OIG report, “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported,” on July 26, 2016. On December 8 — the day following the Pentagon’s audit announcement — he and Boston University Economics Professor Laurence Kotlikoff co-authored a column for Forbes explicating the research and expanding on the problematic OIG report, stating,

“The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015, the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments. According to the GAO’s Comptroller General, ‘Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions … For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly.’”

He continues, “Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s ‘failure to correct system deficiencies.’ The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year-end unsupported adjustments. No information is given about these 170 transactions. In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments  were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude. The July 2016 report states, ‘In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter.’”

Affirming the jaw-dropping anomalous figure led Skidmore promptly to enjoin Fitts for a collaboration with graduate students examining thousands of additional Inspector General reports, dating from 1998 through 2015, the last year for which data was available at the time of the project — concentrating solely on the Defense Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“This is incomplete,” Skidmore advised, “but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the Army.”

Although even the preliminary numbers would sound nearly anyone’s alarm bells, Skidmore refused to propound on the nature of the unaccounted funds — whether it could have been allotted toward covert but legitimate projects, misallocated, brazenly wasted, or otherwise — but did characterize the raw findings as profoundly telling of a dearth in transparency in funding and parallel evisceration of due process in budgeting at the federal level of government.

Whether the Pentagon’s vanishing funds will ever be matched to tangible ends in its first or future financial post-mortem seems optimistically unrealistic; however, that the ball is finally rolling presents to the disgruntled public a momentous opportunity to pressure officials to be held accountable for squandering such embarrassing sums of taxpayer income.

After all, they’re listening — Skidmore’s interview with USAWatchdog came out on December 3 — with the Pentagon’s announcement following just four days later, on the 7th. Further, Skidmore noted peremptorily that, as he and Fitts scoured figures online, they observed something suspicious on the website for the Office of Inspector General, asserting in a side note,

“[A]fter Mark Skidmore began inquiring about OIG-reported unsubstantiated adjustments, the OIG’s webpage, which documented, albeit in a highly incomplete manner, these unsupported ‘accounting adjustments,’ was mysteriously taken down. Fortunately, Mark copied the July 2016 report and all other relevant OIG reports in advance [available at this link]. Mark has repeatedly tried to contact Lorin Venable, Assistant Inspector General at the Office of the Inspector General.  He has emailed, phoned, and used LinkedIn to ask Ms. Venable about OIG’s disclosure of unsubstantiated adjustments, but she has not responded.”

In fact, as noted previously by The Mind Unleashed, the Department of Defense also recently edited its original audit announcement in a superficially innocuous yet potentially insidious detail — halving the total number of auditors to descend on the military, as seen in an internet archive of the page, to just 1,200 — without explanation, notation of adjusted figure, nor any other remark explicating the adjustment a simple mistake or otherwise.

Despite a remarkable $21 trillion essentially having evaporated from just two albeit notoriously thriftless governmental agencies, Skidmore fears public apathy will reign — with predictably wearisome results.

“If the American people don’t stand up and say this is unacceptable,” the economist admonished, “nothing is going to happen. This is just wrong.”

Image: DOD, fnr.

To reiterate, the United States Department of Defense — whose Fiscal Year 2018 budget hovers near a profane $700 billion despite heinous bookkeeping wherein no on is entirely sure what happened to over $10 trillion allotted it in annual budgets over the past three decades — has never faced an audit, ever, in departmental history.

Until now.

“The Defense Department is starting the first agencywide financial audit in its history, Pentagon officials announced today,” a statement on Thursday explained.

Defense Department Comptroller David Norquist told the press he had received notification from the Office of the Inspector General announcing the first-ever audit of the Pentagon beginning this month — an endeavor so momentous in scope, no less than 1,200 auditors will be unleashed across the department to help ensure its completion. [Notably, the original DoD statement cited the number of auditors to execute the probe at 2,400 — a figure which changed remarkably and without additional notation or explanation from the Pentagon as to the nature, typo or otherwise, of the error.]

For good reason — the colossal undertaking will delve into every facet of the Pentagon’s inner workings — from weapons and personnel, to supplies, property, and bases, of which purportedly the exact number remains unknown.

“Starting an audit is a matter of driving change inside a bureaucracy that may resist it,” Norquist told members of the House Armed Services Committee during his tenure as CFO at the Department of Homeland Security, on the feasibility of carrying out an audit, when the time came for DHS to endure its own government-mandated, fine-toothed comb.

While this will be the Defense Department’s first audit in its history, it won’t be the last — Norquist tacitly acknowledged coming somewhat into compliance with the 90s-era law, announcing the Pentagon would undergo audits annually, “with reports issued every November 15.”

“With consistent feedback from auditors, we can focus on improving the processes of our day-to-day work,” the comptroller stated, championing the efficacy of the process. “Annual audits also ensure visibility over the quantity and quality of the equipment and supplies our troops use.”

For years, Defense officials proclaimed the infeasibility of auditing the Pentagon and its myriad branches, asserting without irony that, because an audit would be so massive, one could never be effectively or thoroughly performed.

“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon, told the Guardian at the beginning of the year. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”

Indeed, the lack of collective bookkeeping and, in essence, oversight have left DoD records in such disarray, it has been said no one at the Pentagon knows where some $10 trillion went — from supplies to weapons to bases to personnel to munitions stockpiles — and an audit proffers no guarantees the sum total will ever be ‘found.’

This stems from a plethora of terrible business practices — some, fomented directly as a stopgap when relevant information lacks.

For instance, a report from Reuters more than three years ago divulged, among a sizable laundry list of additional eyebrow-scratchers, the anything-but-ordinary, yet standard operating procedure, termed, “plugging,” as explained by dedicated 15-year Pentagon employee, Linda Woodford — whose entire career quite literally entailed “inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.”

According to Reuters, at crunch time, Woodford and her colleagues — who were required to reconcile U.S. Navy ledgers with those of the Treasury — regularly compensated for missing numbers, errant figures, and information without context with plugs. Straight lies, some, while other plugs were used to account for time discrepancies with financial institutions clearing checks.

However, although employees would attempt to reckon numbers afterward by entering updated and corrected information, such edits were not the rule, according to sources speaking with Reuters, and adding “unsubstantiated change actions” to the books was in 2013, if not still, par for the course at the Pentagon.

Beyond bookkeeping legerdemain, the DoD apparently harbors as much an issue with consumerism as the rest of the U.S. government — at least, judging by a single, telling glance into the ludicrous arrangement that are the Pentagon’s supply stockpiles and protocols for ordering, a morass of red tape courtesy of the Defense Logistics Agency.

If you want to find the missing trillions, one pertinent starting point would be the DLA, about which Reuters deadpanned, “keeps buying more of what it already has too much of.

“A document the Pentagon supplied to Congress shows that as of September 30, 2012, the DLA and the military services had $733 million worth of supplies and equipment on order that was already stocked in excess amounts on warehouse shelves. That figure was up 21% from $609 million a year earlier. The Defense Department defines ‘excess inventory’ as anything more than a three-year supply.

“Consider the ‘vehicular control arm,’ part of the front suspension on the military’s ubiquitous High Mobility Multipurpose Vehicles, or Humvees. As of November 2008, the DLA had 15,000 of the parts in stock, equal to a 14-year supply, according to an April 2013 Pentagon inspector general’s report.

“And yet, from 2010 through 2012, the agency bought 7,437 more of them — at prices considerably higher than it paid for the thousands sitting on its shelves. The DLA was making the new purchases as demand plunged by nearly half with the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The inspector general’s report said the DLA’s buyers hadn’t checked current inventory when they signed a contract to acquire more.”

Though the manipulation of trillions of tax dollars in part through ‘plugs’ and the hoarding of absurdly excess Humvee parts might provide superficial if nihilistic entertainment in print, that the United States Department of Defense — and its war machine apparatus squeezing its tentacles around the planet — hasn’t found mandatory audits necessary until this late date should particularly offend those opposed to an imperialist agenda.

Empire isn’t hidden in such smaller-scale erroneous numbers, Humvee parts, bullets, airplane parts, zippers, or pens — but without a shred of accountability, it might.

Image: Pentagon/Globalresearch.ca.

“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” study researcher Hans de Kroon, of Raboud University, told The Guardian.

With the total mass of flying insects plunging by more than 75 percent in just over a quarter century, ‘very alarming’ hardly pretends to describe the jaw-dropping findings.

Insects play an inextricable role in the health of planetary ecosystems, providing prey for larger species and pollinating the world’s agricultural crops and edible plants — so, a decisively steep decrease in their numbers prognosticates at best an austere future.

In 1989, dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany began using a strictly standardized method of collecting insects using mesh tents called malaise traps to catch 1,500 samples of all flying insects from 63 nature preserves. But, despite, the somewhat limited geographical breadth of the research, scientists warn their findings, published in the journal Plos One, apply to any area focused predominantly on agriculture.

“After measuring each year’s samples by weight, scientists found that the average fell by more than 75 percent over the 27-year period. During the summer months, the fall was measured at around 82 percent,” RT reports, emphasis added.

That’s an 82 percent decline during the season insect populations should be their most voluminous.

Environmental and natural scientists and others have warned for years vanishing pollinator populations will ultimately spell disaster for humans and other animal species, but such a comprehensive study as that undertaken by researchers with Raboud University in the Netherlands has never before been managed.

Despite the dwindling of insects is clear and undeniable, the scientists were uncertain as to a singular cause, positing pesticides, urbanization, changing climate, and other factors are all likely contributors.

“The weather might explain many of the fluctuations within the season and between the years, but it doesn’t explain the rapid downward trend,” lamented Martin Sorg of the Krefeld Entomological Society in Germany and leader of research by the amateur entomologists. He believes the tiny creatures forays away from protected areas — which offer infinitely greater diversity than agriculturally-cultivated land — contributes to population downfall.

“Farmland has very little to offer for any wild creature,” he continued. “But exactly what is causing their death is open to debate. It could be simply that there is no food for them or it could be, more specifically, exposure to chemical pesticides, or a combination of the two.”

Whatever the cause, the scientists fear the situation has quietly reached apocalyptic proportions.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth,” asserted Professor Dave Goulson of Sussex University, who contributed to the study, but “there has been some kind of horrific decline. We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

As the Guardian notes, many specific species of flying insects and pollinators, like the Monarch butterfly, have come under the microscope over dwindling numbers, but — because the researchers in this study sampled species like wasps and flies not ordinarily studied, at all — this body of data is considered comprehensive enough to be representative of the true scope of the problem.

Worse, researcher Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University says the fact the study conducted sample sweeps of environmentally-protected areas should further amplify alarm.

“All these areas are protected and most of them are well-managed nature reserves,” he noted. “Yet, this dramatic decline has occurred.”

A two-year study from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services appearing on the website for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and published in February 2016, hoisted a red flag on vanishing insect numbers worldwide — bluntly reminding the world, in part,

“Nearly 90 per cent of all wild flowering plants depend at least to some extent on animal pollination.”

Additionally, “The volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination has increased by 300 per cent during the past 50 years, but pollinator-dependent crops show lower growth and stability in yield than crops that do not depend on pollinators.”

That, before the extent of insect declension had been assessed.

“It provides important new evidence for an alarming decline that many entomologists have suspected is occurring for some time,” U.K.’s University of East Anglia’s Lynn Dicks, who did not participate in the research, said of the study findings.

“If total flying insect biomass is genuinely declining at this rate — about 6% per year — it is extremely concerning. Flying insects have really important ecological functions, for which their numbers matter a lot. They pollinate flowers: flies, moths and butterflies are as important as bees for many flowering plants, including some crops. They provide food for many animals – birds, bats, some mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Flies, beetles and wasps are also predators and decomposers, controlling pests and cleaning up the place generally.”

Goulson darkly lamented that, during a road trip across France this summer, the splats of dead insects didn’t even force repeated windshield cleanings as such a route through the country would have in years past — a telling if grim reminder of the inextricable role in the planet’s health insects play.

Perhaps now scientists and researchers won’t be seen so much as alarmists — and the resounding Cassandra call to action can be heeded with some expediency — if the situation isn’t already irreversible.

It was just two years ago Goggy Davidowitz, professor in entomology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, sounded nearly the exact alarm Goulson is now imploring the world to hear.

“If insects were to disappear, the world would fall apart,” Davidowitz flatly asserted after a similarly ominous study in November 2015, “there’s no two ways about it.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Orangeaurochs.

“On this day of hope and suffering, Catalonia’s citizens have earned the right to have an independent state in the form of a republic,” asserted Catalonia regional leader, Carles Puigdemont.

“My government, in the next few days, will send the results of [the] vote to the Catalan parliament, where the sovereignty of our people lies, so that it can act in accordance with the law of the referendum.”

The Guardian and other mainstream sources report upwards of 90 percent of around 2.3 million voters choosing in favor of Catalan independence, and although the final numbers must still be counted and assessed, conjecture already lambastes Spanish authorities’ response to the referendum — stifling censorship for months followed by a violent crackdown by law enforcement of polling places, which left well over 800 people injured and bloodied — as responsible for swelling support for the referendum by orders of magnitude over too-close-to-call assessments prior to October 1.

Earlier in the day, Puigdemont aptly prognosticated, “police brutality will shame the Spanish state for ever.”

Paramilitary Civil Guard and national police indelicately removed people attempting to vote, unceremoniously dropping men, women, and the elderly — with varying degrees of serious injury — onto the pavement at the feet of awaiting Catalans and regional police; the latter of which confronted Spanish authorities and were seen in tears as they defended the defenseless from fascistic attacks.

Els @mossos plorant de ràbia i impotència però obrint camí perquè la gent pugui votar a Vielha. pic.twitter.com/LjJWVlOeei

— Magda Gregori Borrell (@MagdaGregori) October 1, 2017

Reports the Guardian,

“Jordi Turull, the Catalan regional government spokesman, told reporters early on Monday morning that 90% of the 2.26 million Catalans who voted Sunday chose yes. He said nearly 8% of voters rejected independence and the rest of the ballots were blank or void. He said 15,000 votes were still being counted.The region has 5.3 million registered voters.

“Turull said the number of ballots did not include those confiscated by Spanish police during violent raids which resulted in hundreds of people being injured. At least 844 people and 33 police were reported to have been hurt, including at least two people who were thought to have been seriously injured.”

Videos and photos of beaten and bruised Catalans in the clutches of Spanish national police — including many images of senior citizens with blood dripping from open wounds — circulated on Sunday, almost immediately after polls opened. Authorities were seen breaking down doors and employing brute force against eager Catalans — some of whom flocked to polling stations the previous day in anticipation of difficulties voting in a referendum deemed ‘seditionary’ by the ruling government of Spain — as they confiscated equipment and ballot boxes in an effort to stop the vote going forward.

CNN reports regional officials castigated Spanish authorities for the excessive and sweeping force used against peaceful, unarmed civilians, as regional Minister of Foreign Affairs Raül Romeva flatly asserted,

“I want to make clear that all responsibility, all violence acts, repression is exclusively on the government of [Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy.

“Today Europe has to choose, shame or dignity. Violence or democracy, this is our demand. With this demand, we begin to work for a response to these circumstances. The absence of a response would suppose a lack and loss of credibility to the EU and its institutions.”

Rajoy — aligning with the entirety of the Spanish state — balked at the mere suggestion the referendum held weight, reiterating in a televised speech,

“At this point, I can tell you very clearly: Today a self-determination referendum in Catalonia didn’t happen.”

Obdurate, insistent dismissals from Madrid of the viability of the vote for independence, however — and despite, or perhaps due to, footage of thuggish tactics used by Spanish law enforcement — did not deter voters from casting their approval for sovereignty.

Indeed, the fraught and longstanding battle for Catalan independence — (yesterday’s was the latest in a succession of attempts to essentially secede from Spain) — surrounds disparities in representation and governance of the autonomous region.

While Catalonia contributes around one-fifth of the 1.1 trillion-euro Spanish economy, the regional government maintains say in its policing, health, and education — but harbors no control over “taxes, foreign affairs, defense, ports, airports, and trains,” the Times of India explains — leaving an apparent majority of Catalans, who share a distinct language and culture, ravenously seeking a split.

“According to experts,” the Times continues, “lack of economic autonomy, especially, has made people angry. Most of Spain’s regions pay taxes to the central government and then receive a portion in return to spend on health, education and public infrastructure, with the sole exceptions of the northern Basque Country and its twin region Navarre. These regions collect their own taxes and decide for themselves how to spend the money. Spain’s refusal to extend these tax-and-spend privileges to Catalonia has fuelled outrage […]

“The current movement for independence gained traction after Spain’s Constitutional Court in 2010 struck down parts of a charter that would have recognized Catalonia as a nation within Spain and granted it greater autonomy. Since the court’s ruling, hundreds of thousands of Catalan residents have taken to the streets every year on September 11, a Catalan holiday, to demand independence.”

As for Spain’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge Catalonia’s vote to cleave itself, analysts surmise the motivation as simple as economic impact — if the region indeed buoys Spain’s economy, its leaving would be detrimental. In equivalent contrast, Catalan officials contend the lack of true representation or say in governance damages its own economic health beyond the tenable.

Despite Spanish national forces’ barbarous voter suppression tactics, that millions not only managed to cast votes, but did so in favor of independence was considered a complete shock — particularly after opinion polls from July suggested as many as 49 percent did not agree with moving toward sovereignty.

Now that Catalans have spoken, the New York Times reports, “Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader, said late Sunday that Catalans had won the right to have their own state and that he would soon present the result of the referendum to the regional Parliament to make it binding […]

“Having defied Madrid over the referendum, Mr. Puigdemont’s government risks increasing tensions even further if he proceeds with a declaration of independence. The move could prompt his immediate suspension from office.”

No matter what ultimately results from the historic Catalan referendum this year, indiscriminate cruelty wrought by Spanish authorities at the behest of the State leaves an indelible stain of totalitarianism in the minds of those watching around the globe.

Image: Twitter/Video still shot/Magda Gregori.

Animal rights activists and advocates believe the proposed Pet Rescue and Adoption Act (AB 485) would effectively end the use of breeding operations — termed “puppy mills” (or other species), these massive operations churn out a constant stream of puppies, kittens, and other companion animals, often in abominable, abusive, or neglected conditions — and aspire to choke out retailers who insist on sourcing animals that way.

Legitimate criticism certainly exists in the law’s inherent elimination of choice from the marketplace, as far as the retail pursuit of specific pet breeds is concerned, with detractors pegging a dearth of reliable genetic and medical information available for individual shelter animals, as well as the fact many popular breeds never wind up housed in such facilities.

Proponents rightly point to abandoned and unwanted animals, as the United States continues grappling with an astronomical explosion in feral and stray populations — which the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reports ‘forced’ the euthanization of at least 1.5 million unadopted shelter companion animals — in just 2016, alone.

“California taxpayers spend over a quarter of a billion dollars every year to house homeless animals,” San Diego Humane Society CEO and President Dr. Gary Weitzman told Huffington Post in an emailed ASPCA statement pertaining to the new bill, adding the strongest potential lies in the elimination of “a main source of sales for inhumane commercial breeders.”

In fact, as the San Diego Tribune points out, well over 200 areas around the U.S. have implemented policies like the California legislation, and have indeed severely crippled pet breeding operations to the betterment of strays and mill animals, alike, over the past decade, and reports,

“California has more than 33 cities with these ordinances, from South Lake Tahoe in 2009 to Oceanside in 2015, to Los Angeles in 2016, to San Francisco and Sacramento this year.

“Most of these rules allow storefronts to sell animals acquired from shelters, rescue groups and nonprofits. In practice, many of the targeted pet-store merchants have gone out of business or been forced to move locations.

“Supporters said the bans are a local reaction to breeders, mostly located in the Midwest, who warehouse dogs and cats like livestock. They said too often, animals, especially breeding mothers, are locked in unsanitary and inhumane conditions without proper access to medicine, exercise and contact with people.”

And HuffPost expounds, “One of the most comprehensive of those measures was passed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August. Cambridge’s ordinance bans pet stores from selling any non-rescue animals other than fish — meaning that besides dogs and cats, it also covers everything from birds to snakes to small animals like mice, rats and hamsters.”

Advocates reiterate the measure only affects retail sales of pets, and anyone searching for a specific breed would be free to contact an ethical breeder privately — an obstacle critics feel places too many barriers between customer and product, thus threatening to erase the market of many popular breeds never making it to shelters.

“Pet stores represent a well-regulated and reliable source for responsibly raised animals, often breeds which are not readily available nearby,” Mike Bober, president and CEO of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, told HuffPost. “We do think that consumer choice is an important part of this.”

Although Bober’s latter point is again valid, the idea problematic breeding farms are the rarity rather than the rule is preposterous when examined in the context of an unending list of horrendous animal abusers calling themselves reputable to reap profit, supply the vast majority of pet stores — from the little guy to corporate behemoths.

Paul Solotaroff toured an illegal puppy mill as part of an investigation into such facilities for Rolling Stone in January 2017, observing,

“Out the back door and up a dirt trail, the worst was yet to come. A cinder-block kennel, hidden from the street, housed the bulk of this puppy-mill stock: 50 or 60 more parent dogs who’d likely never seen sunlight or spent a day outside this toxic room. They wept and bayed and spun in crazed circles as we toured the maze of cages. Some went limp as the rescuers knelt to scoop them. Each was photographed, then carried downhill to the giant rig at the curb. There, teams of vets from the Cabarrus Animal Hospital worked briskly to assess each rescue. Once triaged and tagged, they were loaded into crates on the Humane Society’s mammoth truck, an 80-foot land-ship with clean-room conditions, and taken to a staging shelter. One hundred and five dogs came out of that house, many of them pregnant or in heat. I turned to John Goodwin, the director of the puppy-mills campaign for HSUS, and asked him how many puppies sold in this country — at Petland and Citipups and a thousand other pet stores — come from puppy mills as dire as this one.”

Emaciated animals, deplorably filthy conditions, disease, parasites, and other issues plague the animal prisoners of breeding-mill hell — and with profit potential tantalizingly large, violation of regulations and animal rights comprise a risk worth taking for the unscrupulous, to the detriment of the pets.

“Most every pup sold in stores in America comes from this kind of suffering — or worse,” Goodwin insisted. “If you buy a puppy from a pet store, this is what you’re paying for and nothing else: a dog raised in puppy-mill evil.”

Matt Bershadker, president and CEO of the ASPCA, added, “Puppy mills house breeding dogs in small, wire-floored cages, separate puppies from their mothers at a very young age, and ship them hundreds of miles to pet stores around the country.”

While the proposed legislation in California might not be ideal, it could save state residents a small fortune, as the San Diego Tribune notes, since “it costs taxpayers an estimated $250 million each year to pick up, house and often euthanize unwanted animals, including more than 800,000 dogs, cats and rabbits, according to the same legislative analysis.”

To begin thwarting the animal abusers on an individual level, the ASPCA maintains a mapped and updated list of puppy mills and pointers for animal advocates on their website, in this link.

Governor Brown has until October 15 to sign the bill into law, but — as to his intentions — remained tight-lipped when the Associated Press requested comment.

(Image: Puppy Mill. Credit: ASPCA)