I try to be upbeat, unlike the typical conservative always griping about things going to hell in a handbasket. But lately even I worry. Regardless of what else is going right or wrong, if we lose our ability to reason, our freedom and prosperity will surely follow.

Recently I realized that I had run across three cases of bizarre news in connection with dams. A single instance could be written off to 'stuff happens.' Two could be a crazy fluke. But three...three cannnot be dismissed.

The first I learned about from a fellow poster here on the SP public blog. I forget who posted it, but thanks to whomever it was. A Michigan property owner was threatened by a state agency for having a dam without a permit, but it turned out that, you guessed it, the dam had been built by beavers. Unbelievable, but confirmed by snopes.com.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/dammed.asp

A second, I found in the 'Terra Incognita' section of Liberty Magazine. A group of environmentalists in Poland dialed Eco-911 to report some illegal logging. They had found neat stacks of felled trees in a nature reserve. Concerned police flew into action. Once again, it was beavers at work. Even Hufffpo was amused.

The third comes from our Mother Country of Great Britain. There, a 6 year old boy was warned by a local government council and prohibited from building 'pebble dams.' His father said that he had built a five inch dam in a two inch stream, for fun. A parish official said "We can't have people doing this sort of thing on a willy-nilly basis." How do you go from Churchill to Thatcher to that in such a short time? A full report, with a photo of the illegal dam, is here from the UK Daily Mail.

Could this be one of the signs of the apocolypse? I don't know, but when I find three bizarre bureacratic stories about dams alone, my spidey-sense is going into convulsions. Western Civilization is rapidly going insane, is it not?