Radioactive Wild Boars Still Roaming the Forests of Germany 212
An anonymous reader writes 28 years after the Chernobyl accident, tests have found that more than one in three Saxony boars give off such high levels of radiation that they are unfit for consumption. In 2009 almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to hunters in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated to be sold. "It doesn't cover the loss from game sales, but at least it covers the cost of disposal," says Steffen Richter, the head of the Saxon State Hunters Association.
Interesting line from TFA: (Score:2, Informative)
"Wild boar are thought to be particularly affected because they root through the soil for food, and feed on mushrooms and underground truffles that store radiation. Many mushrooms from the affected areas are also believed to be unfit for human consumption. "
That's pretty interesting. Chernobyl was a long time ago.
Re:Interesting line from TFA: (Score:5, Informative)
It was only about one half-life (Cs-137) ago.
Also, Cs-137 gets washed to lower soil layers very slowly (a few millimeters per year).
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It seems odd that the pigs are too irradiated to eat but seem to thrive and breed just fine.
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Nothing odd about it. Their females are fertile when less than a ear old, their males two years after birth. Long term effects of radiation are felt later.
Re:Interesting line from TFA: (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems odd that the pigs are too irradiated to eat but seem to thrive and breed just fine.
Most people these days prefer to live a good deal longer than their earliest possible breeding time.
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You can't tell that from the actions of most teenagers.
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Now you want to call praying mantis people too? wow, what an abandonment of specieism that would be.. So when are mosquitoes gonna be protected as having individual rights under the Constitution? Not anytime soon, I reckon..
So anyway, to the seemingly well thriving radioactive wild boars, my answer is what about them seafood (tuna fish) that created dementia and mental retardation in a California child, because her mother fed her a can of tuna fish every morning, and it turned out he got mercury poisoning,
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Now you want to call praying mantis people too? wow, what an abandonment of specieism that would be.. So when are mosquitoes gonna be protected as having individual rights under the Constitution? Not anytime soon, I reckon..
Whoosh? Pretty sure that was just supposed to be funny. Granted, it's sort of hard to tell if people are kidding about that sort of thing nowadays, with some extremists actually declaring the life of a human and a rat as equivalent in value.
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I, for one, welcome our equivalently valued rat overlords.
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I imagine the praying mantis would indeed prefer that.
If given the choice....
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I remember reading that it turns out that preying mantis females don't actually eat their mate all that often in the wild, it's just that all the observations were of caged mantises [wikipedia.org], where due to the stress of being caged the females ate their mates a lot more frequently. [snopes.com]
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North Italy, Austria and then south Germany where the first regions hit by the Chernobyl explosion.
Re:Interesting line from TFA: (Score:5, Insightful)
North Italy, Austria and then south Germany where the first regions hit by the Chernobyl explosion.
Don't quote me on that, but I'm decently sure that Chernobyl (and Pripyat) were the first regions hit by the Chernobyl explosion...
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I'm pretty sure Fukushima, Japan was the first area hit by Chernobyl's explosion.
Re:Interesting line from TFA: (Score:5, Informative)
Mushrooms can be used to bioconcentrate metals. Some species prefer cesium:
http://www.herbmuseum.ca/conte... [herbmuseum.ca]
Silver lining (Score:5, Funny)
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If you shoot a hog that's radioactive enough to give it a visible glow, you will lose your hunting license, face fines and possibly jail time, since using unnatural light sources while hunting is prohibited.
(This is Germany, what did you expect?)
Auto-shotgun (Score:2)
Excellent for radioactive boars, bloodsuckers and chimeras.
Spam (Score:2)
They do not mention the radioactive level (Score:3)
Found it (Score:5, Informative)
2) Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
I wish the article could have told that.
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Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
60% of the time, it works every time [youtube.com] :)
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1) germany apparently forbid anything above 700 bq/Kg , whereas otehr country do it at 3000 Bq/Kg.
2) Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
I wish the article could have told that.
The isotope is C137.
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Which means this is nothing but a hunter subsidy. Like whaling for Japan where their excuse is "whales eat all the fish".
which is really odd when it comes to baleen whales which feed on kill on zooplacton.
What? (Score:2)
I'm confused by the text you quoted as coming from a parent comment. I cannot find that text in the parent comment, and AFAICS comments are not editable once posted, so that means it was never there. Where did you find this:
> Which means this is nothing but a hunter subsidy. Like whaling for Japan where their excuse is "whales eat all the fish".
And about the subsidy, juts for the record, since the text is there and I cannot find the quoted comment to reply to:
The articles says the compensation is just en
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I'm confused by the text you quoted as coming from a parent comment. I cannot find that text in the parent comment, and AFAICS comments are not editable once posted, so that means it was never there. Where did you find this:
> Which means this is nothing but a hunter subsidy. Like whaling for Japan where their excuse is "whales eat all the fish".
And about the subsidy, juts for the record, since the text is there and I cannot find the quoted comment to reply to:
The articles says the compensation is just enough for disposal of the dead animals, it isn't even a compensation for missed earnings had they sold the meat. And I can tell you selling that meat would not a problem, people like buying wild animal meat. So the statement makes no sense at all, except to show that ideology often blinds ones reasoning abilities.
are you showing all comments? rated -1 even? because I hit quote parent button. I browse at all comments shown and it shows up for me.
Wizards (Score:2)
Recently sighted... (Score:2)
Reports are coming in of a girl riding on the back of a giant wolf, apparently hunting large boar with a spear.
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Mononoke didnt hunt boar.
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Let's not forget her battle with the possessed one. And what would an unknowing bystander think was going on?
government coddling (Score:2)
my motto: if a food doesn't meet health standards, then you can't sell it. I'm not going to wipe your bottom for you and buy your contaminated boars.
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Radioactive materials concentrate up the food chain so I suppose this is one way to let nature clean it up for you.
Radioactive Germans probably costs more to the national health service than buying the meat. Meat that only makes you sick, probably doesn't cost much; however, cancer is expensive.
Perhaps it is a conspiracy, we don't want some Blond Haired, Blue eyed, big nosed man with a german accent calling himself PiggyMan! I'm sure the Muppets have a job for him...
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Wrong Units (Score:2)
Becquerel is a measure of activity and does not tell you anything about the nature of the radiation. It is a stupid measurement. Rem or Sievert would be more useful.
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The "nature" of the radiation is known - it's the decay of Cs-137.
rem or Sv, on the other hand, are inappropriate units for specifying how radioactive a sample of material is, since rem or Sv numbers can, strictly speaking, only been determined after living tissue was exposed to radiation.
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How do you know it is Cs-137? The TFA doesn't say.
Coolest T-shirt idea ever! (Score:2)
And Yet It Is Not The Apocalypse? (Score:2)
Radioactive wild boars roam Germany. I'm calling it as the first sign of the Apolcalypse!
Lite Salt? (Score:2)
The 700 Bg/ Kg seems awefully low.
Here in Australia you can wander into any local supermarket and buy "Lite Salt" wich is 50% Potassium Chloride. These typically have a mass of 170 gm and consequently an activity of 4000 Bg. So by German standards that is 23529 Bg/Kg and hence way above the legal limit.
Re:Reall problem: German radiation phobia (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't the trichinosis already be irradiated anyway? Just think of the radiation as a 'very-slow-roasting' system. The meat is practically falling off the bone before the animal is even dead.
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For the humor-impaired, this is a joke.
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BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit ab
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Wild boar absofrickenlutely love human habitation.
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/06/... [npr.org]
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It looks like the limits are in line with most of the world [fukuleaks.org].
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It looks like the limits are in line with most of the world [fukuleaks.org].
Those are for overall food radiation levels. If you ate wild pork for 100% of your diet, those numbers would be important. But wild boar is something that is eaten infrequently. It is like mercury in tuna. If you are pregnant, and eat tuna everyday, it is a concern. Otherwise, a tuna sandwich a few times a month is harmless.
Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, and eat neither tuna nor wild boar. But I do eat bananas, which contain enough radiation to occasionally trigger radiation alarms [wikipedia.org].
Re:Reall problem: German radiation phobia (Score:4, Interesting)
hmm...
Assuming all of the radioactivity is due to Cs-137, that 600 Bq/kg limit translates to 0.0000003 micrograms of Cs-137 in any given kg of wild pork.
Okay, I can buy the argument that that "safe" limit errs on the side of caution a bit much....
Re:Reall problem: German radiation phobia (Score:5, Interesting)
hmm...
Assuming all of the radioactivity is due to Cs-137, that 600 Bq/kg limit translates to 0.0000003 micrograms of Cs-137 in any given kg of wild pork.
Okay, I can buy the argument that that "safe" limit errs on the side of caution a bit much....
The real problem from a meltdown isn't really the radiation. While that's scary and all... the real problem is what else is released and what the shorter half life elements decay into. Most of what the control rods are made out of are horrific heavy metals, and during the Chernobyl incident the Russians panicked and dumped large amounts of liquid lead and cement laced with lead into the basement of the reactor. The lead boiled off and then rained back down all over the region. If I lived in the area, I'd be more concerned about that lead than I would be about the radiation.
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Uranium is similar in toxicity to lead, for what it's worth, disregarding radiation and decay products and whatnot.
I don't remember hearing anything about dumping lead on the thing? I can't see it as being worse than living within 1000mi of a smelter anyway. The smelter [wikipedia.org] in sudbury puts out 150 tons of lead into the atmosphere per year. Radiation was definitely the main concern.
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Especially given that the average human body is giving off about 4500 Bq continuously.
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Assuming all of the radioactivity is due to Cs-137, that 600 Bq/kg limit translates to 0.0000003 micrograms of Cs-137 in any given kg of wild pork.
Cesium tends to behave like potassium in biological systems. It has a biological half-life of about 100 days (half will be excreted by the body in this amount of time). But that can be accelerated by consuming more potassium. So just sprinkle some "lite-salt" on your next dish of wild boar.
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That's kinda like advocating playing the lottery because even a single ticket could win millions.
For a country so good at engineering... (Score:2, Insightful)
... they have a very backwards, almost medieval view of anything nuclear.
Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
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Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
At the peak, German nuclear generation was 133 TWh in 2011. Since then, German renewables generation has grown from 47 TWh/year to 178 TWh/year, Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports.
I'm sorry the facts broke your narrative.
Re:For a country so good at engineering... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
At the peak, German nuclear generation was 133 TWh in 2011. Since then, German renewables generation has grown from 47 TWh/year to 178 TWh/year, Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports.
I'm sorry the facts broke your narrative.
Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
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Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
Because you are an idiot? But for all idiots the old saying is true: google.com is your friend.
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Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
Because you are an idiot? But for all idiots the old saying is true: google.com is your friend.
I must be one of the idiots because I cannot find your 178 TWh/yr production either.
However, I can get close to that. Looking here:
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e... [fraunhofer.de]
I see this:
"The first half of 2014 was marked by mild temperatures and high electricity production from wind and
solar energy. Solar power plants have increased their production compared to the first half of 2013 by
28%, while wind power grew about 19%. In June solar systems have produced twice as much electricity
as wind turbines. In the first half
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What is really helping Germany at the moment is that solar ties up with peak demand nicely. Unfortunately for energy companies peak demand was where they made a lot of their profit, but for Germany as a whole it means they have lots of high value electricity to sell to other countries and their grid doesn't need so much reserve capacity to meet their own peaks.
Also keep in mind that they are not scheduled to be nuclear free until the mid 2020s, so there is still a decade of development to go and this is onl
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Theyre still using nuclear energy, the phaseout completes in 2021.
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It's the green disease.
Pseudo-environmentalism (the thing practiced by the likes of Greenpeace) mixed with misinformed NIMBYism.
People who speak up against this are labeled haters of the environment. Meanwhile, the greens degenerate into ever more radical forms of pseudo-environmentalism.
Any engineer with half a brain and some knowledge on the subject immediately concludes that nuclear power is by far the better realistic option. However, society is not made up exclusively of engineers.
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This kind of environmentalism is based on faith, and not on science. It should therefore be called a religion and lumped with the other populist delusions.
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Well said.
Unfortunately, "populist delusions" always were all the rage.
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How do you explain this [wikipedia.org] then?
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Simple: does not have half a brain.
An engineer doesn't say "can't be done" (unless the laws of physics would be broken) - the real answer is "There are problems X, Y and Z that require research and development."
"Renewables" is typical green bullshit. Anything other than solar panels on rooftops and/or exposed surfaces will have a direct environmental impact (let's not even talk about manufacturing, since that inevitably improves and becomes more efficient).
Wind turbines kill birds.
Insanely large solar farms
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So you really think that you know more about this topic than someone who actually was a nuclear power plant engineer? This kind of arrogance makes me think that you are the one who doesn't have half a brain and nuclear power is your ersatz-religion.
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An engineer doesn't say "can't be done" (unless the laws of physics would be broken) - the real answer is "There are problems X, Y and Z that require research and development."
So, right now, we have a pipe dream. [...] Anyone who truly believes these can replace everything else is living in a fantasy world.
See the irony? :)
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It does sound somewhat silly. However, the problem isn't that renewables can't work (they do work!) - they're just not enough, unless we start coating every surface in solar panels. Research and development can alleviate this problem by increasing efficiency, but ultimately, there's a thermodynamic limit.
That's where the "(unless the laws of Physics would be broken)" part comes in. A solar panel on every rooftop will not satisfy power needs.
On the other hand, it is absurd to say "Nuclear power can never be
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An engineer doesn't say "can't be done" (unless the laws of physics would be broken)
Unless they are being only misleadingly quoted. He said "can't be done" and then expanded on why it can't be done in the current world as it exists with the current political climate and commercial nuclear power companies.
Wind turbines kill birds.
Yes, but probably not as many as nuclear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
"Renewables" is typical green bullshit.
Now who is being dismissive and saying "can't be done"? Renewables are fine, with most of the objects just being the rantings of the rabid anti-green lobby.
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Unlike you, "the Idiot Merkel" has a PhD in Physics.
And as you are not aware about German politics: the exit from nuclear power production was decided 10 years before her by the Schroeder (red/green) government.
The 'idiot Merkel' reverted that decision, extending the run time of nuclear reactors for another 20(?) years. Good for her she realized after Fukushima, that this was a bad idea. Otherwise she had lost the next election. WE DON'T WANT NUCLEAR POWER!
The idiot is you. We live in a fucking fake democra
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"WE DON'T WANT NUCLEAR POWER!"
Who is "we"? A bunch of noise making 20 something hippies?
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The majority of the german citizens. Was that so hard to guess?
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BTW: gas is not cheap. It is bound to the oil price. If oil increases in price, so does gas. And: Germany roughly produces 10% of its electric energy with gas.
So even if gas would became 'cheap' we would lack plants to use it. Just by availability of a 'cheap' energy source a country can not switch its energy production to that source: you need a plant for it!
+++ Idiot +++
Re:Real problem: German radiation phobia (Score:2, Informative)
Apparenlty Cs-137 is the radionuclide of concern and 600 Bq/kg is the threshold for safety. The committed dose equivalent per unit intake for ingested Cs-137 is 1.35e-8 Sv/Bq (Eckerman, Limiting Values of Radionuclide Intake and Air Concentration and Dose Conversion Factors for Inhalation, Submersion and Ingestion, EPA-520/1-88-020, September 1988, Table 2.2, p. 166). This works out to be 8.1 uSv/kg at the threshold. To accumulate an effective dose of 1 mSv (100 mrem) a year, which is the US limit for a dos
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The levels are the same as everywhere else. ... as you hardly get a hunting license as a foreigner, collect some mushrooms and see how far it gets you eating them.
But be my guest
Can only increase your IQ, can't it?
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Of course it is not, and Sweden does not belong to the EU as far as I know. In the EU the level is 600Bq/kg. ... must be because it belongs to the most server irradiated areas (south Sweden at least)
Surprising that the level is so high in Sweden
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It is, have fun getting your vitamin D without radiation.
Re:Reall problem: German radiation phobia (Score:4, Informative)
Ann Coulter. Not even up to politician level of smug idiocy, she's a Fox News talking head/moron.
Ann Coulter is a political Kim Kardashian. She thrives on drawing attention to herself by acting like an idiot. But her statement is a tiny kernel of truth wrapped up in a big ball of stupidity. Slightly higher levels of background radiation may actually be good for you [wikipedia.org]. There is some evidence, in both animals and humans, that slightly higher levels of external (not ingested) radiation, over extended time, can reduced cancer rates and improve health. One hypothesis is that the radiation "exercises" the cellular repair mechanism, and keeps if functioning well.
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Radiation IS good for you.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
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I don't think the prevailing winds matter all that much: it is the winds in the first days after the accident that matter, since during that time the radioactive particles were still in the air. I know that here in the Netherlands (west of Germany) in the months after the accident some types of crops were destroyed because they were considered unsafe for consumption.
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Well, since Dresden is in Germany and Germany is in the EU, going the long way around is usually how it's done...
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If you knew EU bureaucracy, you'd get the joke.
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No, 700 miles is pretty close. 850 would be more closer though, it's about 1300 km.
Nope, indeed Dresden IS about 15000 miles or so EAST of Chernobyl. And about 800 miles WEST of it.
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The ecosystem is not affected by radioactive boars; the ecosystem causes boars to become radioactive. There is therefore no way in which this affects the ecosystem, and is therefore not a problem. Meanwhile, people eating contaminated food is an actual problem, as the summary rightfully mentions.
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Nah, all the alcohol washes that right out of the system.
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Why are wild game hunters deserving of compensation? The world does not owe them a living. If a third of boars are contaminated, then just stop hunting boars and do something else with your life.
No natural enemies (Score:2)
There are no predators - ZERO predators, in German forests. A handful of wolves in Brandenburg, and an occasional bear in Bavaria (making headlines each time it happens). So humans MUST decimate those who proliferate too much, because nature doesn't. For you ideology trumps reason?
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