Strange Stones, Strange Minds

This post is about the mental illness that causes killing - and just some pretty pictures, at the end. 

More and more, we're seeing people posting photos on the internet of mutilated animals, often destroyed by disturbed boys defying their neighborhoods.

I've noticed that many of the people on canned hunts - confused, tame prey animals raised to shoot - resemble the kind of people who would bully human children. Someone has used Whiteout - rather clumsily - on this photo to defy anyone noting her cruelty. 

One very overweight man (and hunters are often overweight in these photos) is shown triumphant over a mated pair of African Lions. This makes me wonder if he isn't also triumphing over African humans he would like to kill - and is threatening. The basic message seems to be, "I can kill what you love." In other words, your wife, your children, your pets, nothing you love is safe from this person. What is that but bullying?

They seem to believe this is one of the criteria for being a superior human being, when, instead, it simply makes them an angry, reactive child. I've seen film on the internet of people shooting charging bears and pretending to be brave. Why not stand in front of a car, shoot the driver, and pretend to be brave? These people have caused the bear to charge, like a bull-fighter harassing a bull, or pit-bull trainers throwing insane dogs into a pit. What are they doing out there, provoking the animal in its home? What human do they really want to kill, their frustration driving them to take out their anger on an animal they don't know?

They're home-invaders, and if they were human, the home-owner would have been praised by so many humans for killing them. Instead, they pose with the animal whose home has been invaded, with powerful weapons that children can be taught to use, and pretend they're brave.

I don't bring a gun into the woods. I've gone into places that, if a predator discovered me - a predator taught that humans are ALWAYS a vicious threat, and it was kill or be killed - if I survived an attack, I would not blame that predator. 

I would blame my fellow humans who turned  a normal wild animal into a furious, frightened engine of attack, instead of what the First Nations lived with - predators whose territories they knew and wisely stayed out of, or, if encountered, used every method of defusing fear. Suggestions were made to look away from the predator, explain, even sing. I've used many of these techniques when dealing with dangerous humans, and all we animals operate on the same body language. I don't claim they'll be successful in every case, but so far, so good. 

Just a pretty photo of some sheep in Forks.

But what could I do with predators who see me as something that - like the chiefs at the Little Big Horn saw Custer - must be wiped out at last to protect future children?

I will have no chance if I face a frightened bear or cougar up here - and I blame those who chase down every predator they see, to kill for no use or reason except to show off. YOU are at fault. Not the predator. You're the human - YOU have the responsibility.

And don't tell me to stay out of the woods that shouldn't be any more dangerous than the reality of a city street; I don't wear a face veil for anybody. If you're scared of the woods you grew up in - what's wrong with you? I've realized why a man in Forks said, "I hate trees." It's because trees are shelter for prey animals. These people always claim the clearcuts offer more food to animals. Really? Is that the only reason? Or do the animals have no more homes, no place to secure themselves? What woodland animal really likes to go out into an open space, unless it must, because there is nothing else? This sounds like more Fairy-Tale "forestry science."

Mushrooms on the beach in LaPush.

It's amazing, in this time of collapsing earth systems and animal DNA, that people celebrate this behavior. It's amazing they celebrate this behavior in their ancestors.

It's time to change the ceremonies. We need to stop having festivals showing off what we've destroyed, and begin to have ceremonies of apology, thanks, memory, and the promise never to do it any more. We need to learn respect and kindness, and the bravery of kindness. Anyone can be cruel; it's often hard to be kind. It takes a special kind of bravery. Any fool can be mean, and usually are.

Odd stone, Clallam Bay beach.

One country on this planet has realized a horrible history and tried very hard to teach its children never to act in that manner again. It has tried to understand its weaknesses and the development of cruelty and destruction, it's attempted to assist what remain of its victims, and learned not to take pride in that destruction. It's the only country on this planet to do it, probably in the whole length of human history. 

And it ain't America. They're beating the crap out of us on solar usage, too.

Pretty stuff: just some recently-sheered sheep near downtown Forks; pardon the IPod camera. Some mushrooms - possibly Gypsy? - down on the Quilleute Nation. And one of a number of strange stones that show up on the Clallam Bay beach. These look oddly like something organic and fossilized. They're not stromatolites, but they're intriguing.

Small Narrow Heart = Small Narrow Mind

Cut by the area's wealthy man.

Today's post is all over the place. I'm going to just label the photos; you're smart enough to click them for larger reading and study.

The Egyptians said we thought with our hearts. We say we feel something in our guts because "having bowels" was an old English phrase for pity.

Speaking to a Clallam Bay librarian. Of COURSE, the Affordable Health Care Act came up.  

She said she was talking to a friend from Sweden. She thought the reason socialist health care works in Sweden is because "it's a much smaller country." I pointed out that that was "apples and oranges," and the reason it works in Sweden is, it's single payer and there are no corporate middle-men involved.

I was explaining socialism and capitalism to her (and some people up here DO get it): how S is for neccessities, C for luxuries. I offered, for example, the roads - and the bus system. 

Indica? Sativa? No - carpet fluff! :D

Immediately, she said the buses were too expensive, cost too many taxes, and "I might as well take a taxi for what they cost me." She then added that the buses went by her house all the time with only one person on them. I tried to explain that I often ride the busses and they're packed, and load and unload completely depending on the route. She kept saying she saw only one person on them. 

I couldn't understand what she was trying to prove. I didn't think she was lying - I thought she might honestly think she saw that. I got home, described this to Dan, and got a real facepalm moment.

Dan, "She sees them at the beginning or end of the run. They don't fill up until further along the route."

God, I feel stupid, for not thinking about that at the time. But he's right.

The shadow remainder of a beach-flea kelp feast.

Now, what have I said about the library hiring from logging families? Resource workers, and many people in uniform, think they're the point. They can mourn a community cat - but not even recognize the clearcut the dear animal was buried on is ghosted with the dead and refugee spirits of the animals that had to run or die. They have no mirrors, they cannot think out side themselves. They can't understand how everybody needs certain things, and they truly seem to believe that anyone who can't keep up should be allowed to fall by the wayside. When did we start ascribing to the morality of the Bataan Death March?

I told her the day would come when people in my age group our her age group would not have cars. Not everybody up here has an extended family. Not everybody can afford the $30 in gasoline it takes just to drive to and from the only large city on the peninsula, with the only vet's outpatient clinic - the very people who need to go there. I told her we all pay taxes so we can ALL use the buses or roads - nobody is denied their use. I told her that her own kids can buy a cheap summer bus pass, and a full day on Clallam County busses - to anywhere - was $3.00. How is this NOT a good investment?

Now, did I not say she worked at the library? According to her idea of how this works, if she goes into the library at night and nobody's there, then all the libraries need to be shut down. And libraries are expensive, so everybody should just buy their own books and media. Of course, she'd be out of a job - but it's always somebody else's life that doesn't count to the logger tribe.

I should have pointed out the Quilleute run a free bus on the hour to LaPush. The native peoples understand that everybody needs transportation. And you do know who's helping fund that - Ms. Stephanie Meyer, and her Twilight series.

Ghosts on slip point. Gone, or going.
So much for their real future of beauty
and health in media and tourism.
They've cut their own throats.

Now, I thought about writing about the local communities and the local tribes, except I felt that would be presumptuous (I'm talking the tribes - you white folks have SO not earned my consideration). Ms. Meyer, like so many fan writers, just slogged ahead, with no thought for anybody's feelings. The Quilleute understandably blew up over her mistreatment of their culture; just another white person sticking feathers in a character's hair and getting the names wrong.

BUT - let's hear it for her or her agent. They sucked it up, worked with the Quilleute, and made sure the tribe benefited from the series. Which is a lesson for all of us; just because you fuck up, just hand over your head on a platter and apologize and try to fix it. Bad can become good. Evidently, vampires have more humane consciousness than loggers. Oh - is that why loggers hate the vampire people? They make them look bad? They make their horrible history look bad? 

Hmmm... I know a WHOLE lot of crap about local tribes I shouldn't have access to. All kinds of screwy stuff has happened to put me in the know about things I shouldn't know.  Maybe I should be looking at zombies.... :D

Yeah, I'm talking to you, Makah tribe, with your "Rayonier Logging Company cooperated with us" down on your hatchery sign. What was THAT about? Or was it another case of, "We get our fish back, or you LEAVE"? Because those treaties are loans. Based on contingencies. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to start the campaign to really go after Hunting-For-Fun. And starting the process for pointing out which candidates are posting photos of themselves with dead animals as trophies. You know who you are. And White-out for writing on photos? Do you NOT have children who know how to use Photoshop? Or GIMP?

How We'll Finally Get Single Payer

Let's see... I'm just sayin' - and I said it first:

1. Let the Health Insurance Industry (HII) cram itself into an attempt at a public health system.

2. Because capitalism (luxury/cheap resources and labor) cannot handle the needs of socialism (necessities for everyone), the system is made to go to pieces.

3. Try to return to the old HII mess, and hear from small businesses angry because they thought they'd got HII off their backs.

4. Turn health care over to socialism, which is the only system that can handle it.

5. Hello, Single Payer.

When This Place Works - And Could Work Better

Beautiful October day over dry grass.

Yesterday's dental appointment was at 2:30 pm, and I had to take the 9:20 bus to Forks, so even after some small errands, had so much time left. Grabbed the Quilleute Tribal bus (runs on the hour) and went down to spend an hour at LaPush on the beach. 

On the busses, my position as the West End North Correspondent came in handy. Yes, that's my title - and get THAT on a nametag; the smaller the job, the longer the title.

The Mother Log on the LaPush beach.

I as able to start linking people up with the new health care system in Washington State, and maybe help a woman - and local vets - get coverage for dental, using specialized funds.

Discovered that people read this blog - where else would they be getting this information? - and they're learning and listening. 

Women agree boys, by hyperlinking on the internet and having to learn to spell, are getting smarter and listening to their mothers. They agree that trophy hunting - hunting for sport or "fun" - is a gateway drug to joining the military, where the ultimate prey can be accessed. We were talking hunting. I said there was NO problem with getting food if it was needed, and a hunter or fisher who fed the family has every right to be proud of that. We're omnivores - we put anything in our faces we can pick or catch. But triumphing over dead animals as though they're an enemy is reprehensible. If you're hungry, hunt and fish and eat. If you're not, leave them alone.

A woman liked the idea of having a yearly thanks ceremony to recognize the animals and fish who feed us, with respect and love and sorrow. As the Makah elder said, weeping as the whale came in: the young men had their tradition back - "But one of our brothers is dead."

A young man on the bus was upset about cash money, as opposed to barter. Somehow the rumor has got running around here that the Federal Reserve is a corporation, and not part of our government. I think it might originate in the prison being privatized. 

Amanita in the RV park

Let me explain money really quickly; it's not little pieces of paper. It's numbers. You may want to barter salmon for everything, but if you want to keep using that cell-phone, Centurylink does not maintain a Halibut Morgue (that's a local reference, to the holding freezer for fist at Neah Bay). If you want to barter, you have to get off the bus, and stop driving because Clallam County needs to run the busses on roads - and you'll have neither, because they don't keep a place to put cattle or dried elk meat. And somebody has to say how much those numbers or worth. Do you want to haggle over all your service bills? Actually, you can negotiate a lot of things - but it's a full-time job.

Credit cards are just numbers without the paper, and they provide short-term, high-interest loans, without application to a bank. That's all. Get 'em paid off on time, and no interest. Do NOT use those numbers unless you HAVE them! It's just a way not to carry paper in your pocket - as money was originally a way not to carry a cow in your pocket. 

Now here's a real - as the Makah call it - Rumor to Rumor moment. I was in a business, and a couple of old guys were angry because their pensions were being messed with. Something about how "specialty pulp" was involved. They mentioned the Florida logging company - the same one ripping the limbs off the Olympic Peninsula forests - was changing pensions. Some kind of trouble with the market. 

NO, I didn't ask. They'd have shut up. Resource-rip workers are like football players; they think the entire society needs to revolve around them, regardless of those damaged or left behind. It's only when their own lives are going to pieces because of what they did that we have to listen to their whining and blaming. And THIS environmentalist isn't going to ever let them get away with it again. Suck it up boys; if you're out of a job and your town goes ghost in the future - IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT.

This sounds an awful lot like the corporate idea of "We're done with you, now starve," is in action here. I don't have details. This isn't a tabloid or junk science site, distracting from real problems; I don't claim to be an expert. But - the first damages to the communities for throwing away the real future of their forests may be happening even now.

Religious Sneakery - and Karma

First, the Karma. Guy up here was trying to rescue a bee colony from a hemlock destroyed in a clearcut. Had to prepare the chunk of log with the colony in it until he could find transport.

Later, talking to him about the news story I was covering, we wandered off on Ted Turner's capitalist (but hopefully soon to get out of his hands) attempts to save the bison. I said now the cattle were dying on the planes, the bison Turner had collected might be able to get away from him, and start the Great Herd again. The first thing out of Mr. Sensitive Bee Man's mouth?

"It'll be open season!" 

Rather than commenting on a hunter's inability to see that, if a species recovers a LITTLE is not a good time to push it back into an endangered status, I'll describe the Karma:

He showed up a couple days later with transport for the hive - and discovered somebody else had torn his hive apart and was about to transport the torn-out comb to his own bee yard. Basically, the guy declared open season on HIM.  Grab-and-growl can come back and grab.

Religious controllers up here:

When speaking to two white (not necessarily the majority) elders at a church about the destruction of the community future by the loggers, the elders were already angry about it. But their pastor - the spiritual leader who stands up and prays at community lunches because evidently NOBODY but he can talk to God? - sat there with his head down, silent. Oh, did I poke at religion's ideas that the world belongs to Satan and deserves to be destroyed? Coward. Greedy coward.

And you New Agers don't get off the hook. When a guy came into town years ago, the first thing he said to me was, "We can cure grief and guilt." Anybody here want to pin a medal on me for not punching him in the face? A spiritual friend calls this a "drive-by psychic."

A couple days ago, when I was warning that the logging industry has opened up the back of the town to a tsunami, he grinned and said, "There will be no tsunamis." His reason? He pointed overhead, and said, "We have a connection to - " What? The ceiling? 

And then he added that he was "subservient" to that thing overhead. Being a woman and being expected to always shut up and sit down when the mens is speaking, my hackles went up. And then he asked me if I meditate - like an accusation that I was getting too angry.

Meditation, you moron, is a private thing. It's about preparing for the battle, not IGNORING it, or it is for those of us in the front lines of the war for our planet. It's NOT for asking a woman if she sits down and shuts up. Especially when you tell the people who hang out at your co-op that there will be no tsunami, and just trust in the imaginary. This is about real problems, real situations, not your fairy-tales.

Oh, and I've finally tracked down those panicky chem-trail stories. They're freaking out because they misinterpreted a story about how NASA was tracking electrical fields around the earth with lithium and barium. They all claim they've SEEN these chem-trails. So they HAVE amazing long-distance space vision? And a Tardis? 

Most of the tests were done in the '70's. Trails of the chemicals were drawn across the ionosphere to attempt to mark the earth's electrical fields. NASA was disappointed with the results, because the trails were very hard to photograph, even with their extremely sensitive cameras. Recent tests have yielded no better results, so NASA is trying to find a better way to map the basic fields. NO, humans cannot see these trails, no matter how good their eyes are.

I found this out because someone I was speaking to about the logging eco-terrorism distracted onto this story - spread by a local woman, who is trying to claim the "guv'ment" is not only spraying all the country and world with poisons, but that now the trees have to be cut down to "save" us all from the poisons. She claims to have "seen" the trails when she's being doing nothing but confusing condensation from jet engines. She's either a liar or a fool or just an ignoramus with a bad agenda - one or all.

While corporate and military organizations do pull all kinds of stupid crap, this isn't one of them. But in reading the stories, I found more mad made-up stories like - get this one - "Comet Ison caused the government shutdown!" On the one hand, go ahead, believe the fairy stories and your half-understood bits of science. They can't help not being able to understand, because America has destroyed its science education. I'd just ignore them as stupid and clueless as I have in the past but - now I've realized it's just more religious distraction. 

All these ideas are about making people panic about fake things when there are real things at stake. This isn't just tabloid silliness any more. This is conscious distraction and a decision to make the under-educated believe all science is junk. And this time it's going to be lethal in a way it's never had a chance before.

I am - right now, flat-out - accusing anyone in religion or corporate-stolen  politics mis-using science to distract and scare - of being guilty of murder. Of the planet, of you, of me. 

But nobody will be around to punish them. Unless you consider suicide from stupidity a death sentence. They'll just get a reward - from Darwin.

And we'll get that award, too, if we don't get to work. We have a choice - we're on the front lines to save and protect, or we've taken the 30 pieces of silver. 

If I hear those coins clinking in anyone's pocket, I'm making sure everybody hears it.

The National Parks Are The Next Target

Here's my prediction:

Once the H.R. 1526 allows the Olympic Peninsula to be clearcut, the next step - by Republican lawmakers - will be to introduce a law - using precedent - about "forest health and communities" that demands the opening and clear-cutting of the National Park.

The Elwha better fight this because the river they fought so hard to free flows through it. 

The Makah and other fishing tribes had better fight it - carbon levels in the oceans will weaken the shells of copepods, one of the most important base planktons of small feeder-fish populations. 

The white population - with our evil history - well, there's no hope for us. A religion based on dominion has us by the throat, and we'll choke on it before we change. And then there will be whining, whining, whining, because the other half of that religion is dependence.

Once again, we have to say - if another nation had attacked our country like this, we'd be bombing their capitals, accusing them of "terrorism."

We know who to blame.

Speaking of "terrorism," the logging culture has turned the term "eco-terrorism" into meaning defending the ecosystem, leaving us nothing but words to fight them with.

No, wait, it hasn't - we have words, pictures and social media to reveal and report. Take photos, of everyone and everything, including mere workers. They're no less guilty than the soldiers given orders at Wounded Knee.

Your National Parks, no matter what State you're in, will be the next target. Wherever thoughtful ancestors set up a future for your grandchildren, the short-sighted will be unable to see what they're doing. They have no idea their own children will be threatened by the lowering oxygen rates. 

Think of them as Sylvester sitting on a branch, sawing it off as he licks his chops after Tweety Bird. Yeah, just that smart.

Oh, and look at what they call "old growth," in this last picture. What? Sixty years, maybe? They really do think that's a long time.

The Big Forest Lie

Harvested like corn - how long will it be here?

This is the biggest lie for the title of a law I've ever seen (Click to link):

H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act  Introduced by Rep. Doc Hastings [R-WA4] on April 12, 2013

This law promotes neither forest health nor better rural communities. It simply allows chemical and fiber companies to slash down what remains of our depleted "forests," that have been broken to the condition of little more than scrub and plantations.

Forestry has long ceased to be about wood. The actual wood harvested is poor, thin and increasingly expensive. Forestry is about "value-added product." Buying a natural product at hunger prices, tearing it to pieces, and reselling it at hugely inflated prices - and none of the communities being robbed receiving the profits. The resulting products are invariably poor-quality and toxic; for example, corn is a comparatively healthy food when consumed cooked by humans; high-fructose corn syrup turns it into a substance deleterious to human health. Chipboard and thin veneers and knotty plywood are poor construction materials.

Corn is a huge sucker of nutrients - so are forests. But corn is fertilized. And even now, it is becoming more and more difficult to grow both these products, with its huge demands on nutrients and water. Corn results in rivers full of toxic levels of nitrogen, repeated clearcuts result in smaller, weaker, ultimately failed environments. 

H.R. 1526 will lead to the future collapse of the local communities, because it will falsely lead them to continue to think they can live as they did in the 19th century or the 1950's - making them ignore what they really have to do to save their own future. These people hate the national parks and forests, because they've been fed propaganda, and believe in a terrible history as good. They want to be able to take the national heritage and turn it into personal products. They can't see what they're doing, they can't understand what they will lose.

I suspect the hatred for the national forests and parks up here has been jump-started by the Elwha getting their river back. The tribe was treated like dirt in the 19th-century. Like wolves here, and bison on the plains, they were supposed to disappear to make way for a "superior race." They've struggled for decades to get their river and their homeland back. They're telling the true story today. 

The "history" about conquest and genocide, human, animal and environmental, is still presented as noble and admirable - in this day and age, as the reputations of Custer, Buffalo Bill and Columbus are revealed for what they actually were, genocidal monsters and even a slaver.

But gradually, people like the Elwha are telling what really happened, reminding us of weeping elders, driven families and destroyed graveyards, of ruined rivers and shattered land. If we're going to grow and become a mature people, we need to relegate our past to the shelf of shame where it belongs. We have to face it, apologize for it, and reform our future behavior. And truly understand what the future has to be. 

The forests are not a field of corn. Treating them like corn will ultimately destroy these communities, within a generation or two. And, because forests produce what we breathe, along with the oceans, it will destroy all of us. Ignoring what this bill is doing to America is suicide for us - and for the planet.

Fairy Tales of the Peninsula

You've all heard about the usual sylan legends. Bigfoot. The guv'ment is poisoning the forests (with the addition that we need to cut them down to Save The Wildlife).

Here's a couple more:

1. Clearcuts are good for wildlife. 

Poke these people a bit, and you find out it's good for deer and grouse - deer and grouse - deer and grouse. They quickly prove they want flat grass, with stags and game birds on it, and nothing else. It's like English Lord wannabe.

2. Environmentalists want to live in big houses in virgin forest and travel by helicopter. 

You wonder what they're on when they make this stuff up (not that there's not plenty of choice; Forks is the meth capitol of western Washington). Want to see how an environmentalist lives? Come visit me. You'll see me using less, trying to make it last, trying to repair it. It's not easy to live in a society that, top-to-bottom, is based on resource rip-and-crash, but using less is a big first step.

Yes, we use firewood - but the other option is electricity, and the cluttered, overstretched grid, that will need to be replaced with steadily-improving in-city small-grid systems. And whomever I buy it from talks how to get Greener (not greener wood, smart-ass), in a system that makes it hard for them. Yes, we're on grids ourselves, but we try to use as little as possible and recycle what we use. We don't go to Walmart or Costco, we try to support the local businesses, what few there actually are. We try to consolidate auto trips, use public transit, and lower the yard-care impact. As far as helicopters go - we could use one or two up here, for a community taxi service. 

3. We can log forever if we just burn slag and replant trees.

I only have to use their own argument against them - that a forest is like a crop of corn: how long would you be able to keep harvesting crops of corn with no fertilizer except burning the stalks? The Mayan calendar was probably a schedule for moving a community once the corn had sucked the ground dry. Want to see someplace that kept harvesting and harvesting? The middle east. Really nice forest recovery there, isn't it?

3. Taking down the National Forest would rescue the rural economy.

I'm not even going to get into how these pulp-paper-and-cheap-building woods people have cut off their own future. I've already gone into toxic products, antique production and use methods, and ultimate soil exhaustion. But we should stop here and take a look at a truly evil bit of legislation that is being used right now to tear the heart out of the State Trust lands, and cheat landowners of their trees: H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act Look who voted for it. Any surprise? If only from an economic standpoint, the use of trees for pulp is the dumbest thing that can be done with wood. There are a million other sources of fast-growing waste products that can be used for pulp, or re-worked to replace the toxic pulp products - and everything made from tree pulp has residual toxins.

Fine wood prices in Seattle.

Here's something any landowner with trees should know: real wood, used AS wood, treated with respect, attracts a lot more money than ripped-out stands of pulp trees. Take a look at this sign on a Seattle street tree. The tree is valued at $8000 - and the fine for taking it out during construction is $16,000. Why? Because trees aren't corn, and shouldn't be sold like corn. The fact we've been treating them like corn has led to wood products that, well, in the words of Dan when we were trying to find some decent wood for a house project, "My grandfather wouldn't have used this for firewood."

Local people and landowners have been scammed out of billions of dollars since logging and pulping began up here. Wood has been bought on the cheap, chopped up like cheap corn, and sold for whatever the industries - often based in distant states - could get away with. What do companies based in Florida care about the Olympic Peninsula, or anybody who lives here?

That doesn't have to be. True planning, care, patience. And yes, people will need help in rural communities until the scarred land and forests - and yes, the fish - recover. And help getting into new, clean industries, like the tourism - ecology and entertainment, just for a start.

Subsidize the people of the rural towns until the forests heal - not the companies that will ultimately turn the whole peninsula into just another bunch of failed logging towns.

Please Don't Shoot the Company In The Head

"Olympic National Park Closed;
will log to pay off National Debt."

I'm perfectly aware the editor of The Forks Forum posted this photo to set off controversy. They haven't had a good Logger vs. Somebody/Anybody fight since the glory days of Twilight.

The man has a name, but do we care who he is? Not really. Who he is isn't important; he's just a cipher employee of an industrial logging company, most of which have their corporate headquarters someplace across the country. I have his name, but why bother with him?

However, if I were a corporate lawyer for any of these companies, I'd be sending down a memo to maybe school the serfs about talking out of turn - or getting them themselves published doing it in the local newspapers. Yes, we all have freedom of information on our side - it's why I can use this photo, under the allowances of Fair Use. 

But if you were a corporate lawyers, and you saw - or knew about - the growing connection of what seems to be intent between the shutdown and finally destroying the hated national parks - wouldn't you want to ask your own people to be a little bit more careful about what they said or how they said it? Right out in public, where anybody could Chelsea Manning you?

If this photo doesn't show anything else, it shows intent. Then again, the Forum's earlier editor did hint that the last time Forks was flush was when the Park burned down and Forks loggers got to clear the wood. 

If nothing else, the information is here. Public. Available. Traceable. Maybe I can't prove anything - but somebody paid to do so, and very well paid, would be able to track the details. I'd be happy to help add nails to that coffin.

And so would this guy, evidently.

Right In The Pocketbook

How morons manage a forest.

Welp, if nothing else gets through to a population where they still believe in Christian Dominion (oh, yes, they actually SAY and BELIEVE that), here's a point:

The logging industry has screwed everybody up here out of billions of dollars.

If the forests had been managed like wood, instead of corn and wood pulp, they would be healthy, beautiful, and growing for a better future for everything that lives here.

Instead, the forests are whipped down as fast as possible, sold to the logging companies for pennies on the board foot, and then sold at higher prices. Taken from State lands, subsidized out of all our pockets. 

The only thing that explains why the people up here have been serfs since the beginning of logging is - that's where they came from. Serfdom eats into the bone, and punishes for use of the head and heart. After awhile, serfs try to be proud of being the support of the king.

But since we're talking Americans, think about what would have happened if they had worked with the parks system in compromise and real land management; the trees would be getting bigger, instead of smaller, every generation, tourism would grow, property values would rise. 

But to do that, the brain has to be stronger than the back. Work smarter, not harder. That's where the money is. And that's where the money is going - into the pockets of middlemen, who work with nothing but their brains. The industries piddle a little back in the form of taxes or scholarships - but it's nothing to what they're making off the people here.

These people have been cheated, and their kids know it. Billions of dollars. Whole futures. Whole lives. The reckoning is coming - but it's probably come to late for resource workers.

And because the forests of the planet are the producers of 1/3 of our oxygen, it may be too late for us all.

Ready for the Big One?

Clallam Bay just opened up the back of the town to the next tsunami or typhoon, with nary a tree buffer in sight. Basically, they've recreated the conditions for the 1700 tsunami (recorded in Japanese records) that came down the Wyaatch river valley and hit Neah Bay from the back. There was nothing to stop it, or at least buffer the force.

Evidently some "American Logger" show is spreading their "forest science," which is basically 19th-century excuse-making. Helping wildlife, my ass. Look,  you can tell when a forestry "scientist" is lying - his mouth is open.

As for helping wildlife - somebody posted a picture of a pileated woodpecker in her feeder. That's right, this secretive deep-forest bird was driven out of its home and hungry enough to approach humans. A woman photographed one of these birds eating sunflower seeds out of her feeder. Another refugee, with nothing to eat and no home. 

Thanks to her for feeding it - but now how or where does it nest and find enough food for the family? These birds eat grubs and other insects in trees. It's eating sunflower seeds like your cat eats dry food pellets; because it can't get anything else. This reminds me of the scene in that movie with Peter O'Toole as the SS general, telling his men to carry food for the children of a bombed-out town. 

Anyway, I'm going to go cover the senior class tsunami drills Thursday - and I think I might hint that it may very well be a good idea to re-think putting the town refuge at the top of the hill south of town, in the expresso-stand parking log/storage. Not only would a tsunami meet no trees to take the brunt of the force - but it would be channeled right through that valley into town. It's going to be bigger and stronger and hit harder where it hits. And we won't even talk about the next typhoon winds through that valley; they'll deepen and speed up like the narrow mouth of a river. What goes around comes around.

Then again, everybody in America seems to have a death wish. I'm getting tired of eating popcorn, watching the rising weather smacking down all over the place. Oh, well. Bad DNA will just have to get cleaned out. It always does.

You heard it here, first.

Worms in the Head

Slip Point - for how long?

Oh, you gotta hear this - the latest malarkey at least one of the locals is telling herself to excuse the clearcuts:

"And the loggers are cutting due to the alleged tons of chemicals being sprayed, drying and infecting them, and are in a hurry to raze it, but the gov't agencies who would be in charge, are."

A lot of kelp makes gulls happy.

I THINK I know what that sentence structure is, but, it's a TAD confused. The-Guvment-Is-Spraying-Chemicals gang is like the Sasquatch bunch up here - a few flyerovers by test planes from Boeing or some condensation trailes are blown up into Attack like a couple of run-together big dog prints becoming bigfoot proof.

And I finally realized the biggest worm in their heads. I didn't even make the connection until now. Americans who have never been taught any different in the last hundred years are like Scottish Lairds or German Junkers - they want a landscape to look like this: stags, salmon, grouse - and nothing else, not even songbirds, because they might eat something the grouse eat, like ranchers killing prairie dogs, and complaining about pronghorn being brought back. In their minds, the seals are eating "all the salmon," and the seagulls are eating "all the herring."

I had a woman complain about the seagulls when I had just picked up four nice herring flipped onto the beach in heavy surf and took 'em home to Jim cat. A young man, here - whose family is going to survive because he's a Green, not a Greed - told me his dad had said to always kill the mergansers, because "they ate fish." He said he stopped the day he saw the mergansers eating lampreys. 

That's right - these nitwits were killing the very birds that were controlling one of the worst threats to the fish. I swear, the ignorance about wildlife and actual forest and river systems is massive. They might know how to find the fish - and clean them out to the very last one, while blaming the hell out of each other ("It's the Indians! The Sports Fishermen! Bigfoot!" Everybody but ME, in other words) - but they have NO CLUE how an actual river system works in the lives of fish. NONE.

Oh, I'd better say real quick, that the lampreys feed the mergansers and guarantee a future lamprey-cleaning patrol, or these morons will go out and try to kill all the lampreys. I wouldn't put it past them; I thought I knew how stupid humans could be about the environment, but it's a daily moment of my jaw hitting the ground. Jesus, are we REALLY that stupid as a species? The only way we - and I say that as a White Person, because I'm not going to pretend we really didn't get it going - see any way to solve anything is to destroy what's there. We can only work from a desert.

One old guy, snarling about "this guv'ment and this president" said "It used to be better." Well, if he means the time when he remembers the river so full of fish "You could walk on 'em," he and his were working overtime to make that go away - yeah, he's right about that. Although I suspect there's an awful lot of the Pap Finn whine of "Why don't somebody put this white-shirted free nigger on the block?" (Huh. And Obama DOES strip off the jacket and show the white shirt a lot, don't he?)

But because they have no more clue about how a democracy works, especially one this size, than a serf under King Richard, I suspect what the old guy actually means is that the Indians are quietly saying, "Give us back our fish - or we get your town back."

That's right - it's Bartolomé day, isn't it? Named after a Catholic Priest who spent 50 years fighting what was being done by the Spanish to the Natives. It used to be named after a white guy - but he was basically just another 15th century proof that, at one time, Hitler would have been a perfectly normal guy. Adolf the Antique didn't look that way by the 20th century, but those poor Natives who went out to trade and feed and help when those three ships sailed into the beach - yeah, they were basically facing the Nazis; genocide, slavery and all.

So... if it "Used to be better" or different than that time - good. It can just keep getting worse, then, while the people who caused it start facing what they did. And learn to act like grown-ups on this planet, instead of greedy, stupid children.

By the way, Slip Point has eagle nests. Just sayin', in case they try for it. And if that hill, logged, falls onto houses, I get to do juicy news coverage. And say, "I told you so." 

I used to hate having to say "I told you so," but now it's starting to feel good. Why should the environment - and my heart - be the only thing broken? Pride can be broken, too - and usually is. I guess in the case of a slip hill, "cometh before a fall" is horribly literal. 

Apple Juice -and - The King Was In The House

Apple cider!

Apple juice squeezed at the annual apple fest. I have a nose infection because our cat, Fearless, showed me affection with a love bite. So I'm stuck having to help three gallons of fresh-pressed apple cider. Oh, poor me.

Elvis impersonator in Sekiu, same day, evening.

Yup, I get to cover the fun stuff. And for free. That's nice.

If you want to see the full articles, you'll probably be able to get them at the Forks Forum by this Thursday.

Rockin' the picnic table.

In the house!

Autumn eats

Autumn goodies

Just a day's harvest around our mini-farm. You don't really need a lot of space to at least start feeding yourself.

Upper left, clockwise:

1. Blue eggs from our four little Easter Egger (Amaracauna/something-else crossbred) hens.

2. Raspberries that took over the sunny side of the shed.

3. Red Flame grapes from the greenhouse.

4. Chanterelles, cleaned, and simmered with butter.

Dinner and desert, for at least a couple of days. Remember, hunter-gatherers worked about 3-4 hours a day. Which is about how long an artist working color can do before the eye perception grays out. The Work Ethic was invented by the people who wanted to do nothing themselves, so they could work everybody else do death. Yes, it was.

If you don't have to kill yourself getting the necessities, you can work all day on what you really want to work on - and working on what you want to work on makes everything work better. There is plenty of food and surplus for everybody, including the young, the elderly and the ill. PLENTY. Enough to go to "waste" and rot back into the earth to feed the plants. I've seen it happen, if we just let nature work. 

Watch the animals in the autumn - they've pretty much done raising the young, and now it's time for food and fooling around, before courtship kicks in. They get vacation, as much as a couple months. They weren't put on the earth to work themselves to death. 

(If you mention honeybees, the workers are clones of the Queen; the Work Ethic works for HER. But you're not a worker bee.)