POLICE, CITY SHOWED LEADERSHIP IN PREPARING FOR POSSIBLE RALLY

Well, another Riverfest has come and gone, with another two days and nights of large crowds, lots of food, drink, boat rides and entertainment, culminating in Saturday evening's terrific fireworks show.

And as important this year is "the mouse that did not roar": There was no Ku Klux Klan rally. As many of us believed all along would be the case, aside from a few errant leaflets, there was really little or nothing to "the KKK rally that didn't happen."

The Klan has been condemned in this space before, and it is an article of faith among people of good will that such hate-and-fear groups have nothing good to contribute to our society or to the free exchange of ideas.

Nonetheless, city management and law enforcement officials are to be commended for treating the potentially explosive matter seriously. Police Chief Howard Boyd, Captain Steve Strong and their staff checked into the reports and did not treat them lightly. In significant part because of the professional manner in which they handled their duties, no imminent threat to the public peace materialized. This episode should give all Cape residents enhanced confidence in our law enforcement leadership.

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There's been a lot of hot air coming out of Rio de Janeiro the last few weeks as a result of the "Earth Summit." President Bush attended this week, and ended up standing his ground on some important issues.

In advance of the summit, a remarkable manifesto, called the Heidelberg Statement, was issued by 264 world-renowned scientists. Among the signers of the statement, which is reprinted below, are 46 leading American scientists, including 27 Nobel Prize winners and 218 other leading scientists worldwide.

It's worth noting, as we have before in this space, some of the prior forecasts of many of the same panic-mongers now busily pushing fantastic scares such as "Global Warming" and "Ozone Holes". Their numbers include many "scientists" who 15 years ago, following back-to-back winters marked by extreme cold, sounded the alarm that we were entering on a new Ice Age. They seem to count on the fact that no one will remember their Doomsday predictions of just a decade and a half back, which they abandoned when proven wrong, even as, today, Global Warming is being shown to be a bunch of Globaloney. The Chicken Littles we will always have with us, it seems; only the variety of catastrophe they forecast seems to vary.

The Hiedelberg Statement is a welcome antidote to such scare-mongering nonsense:

"The undersigned members of the international scientific and intellectual community share the objectives of the `Earth Summit,' to be held at Rio de Janeiro under the auspices of the United Nations, and support the principles of the following declaration.

"We want to make our full contribution to the preservation of our common heritage, the Earth.

"We are however worried, at the dawn of the 21st century, at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.

"We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and has never existed since man's first appearance in the biosphere, insofar as humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.

"We fully subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology that is no more than an extension of this continual progress toward the improved life of future generations.

"We intend to assert science's responsibility and duties toward society as a whole.

"We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.

"We draw everyone's attention to the absolute necessity of helping poor countries attain a level of sustainable development which matches that of the rest of the planet, protecting them from troubles and dangers stemming from developed nations, and avoiding their entanglement in a web of unrealistic obligations which would compromise both their independence and their dignity.

"The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology and Industry, whose instruments, when adequately managed, are indispensable tools of a future shaped by Humanity, by itself and for itself, overcoming major problems like starvation and worldwide diseases."

(Emphasis added.)