Self-Employment Galore!

Solar "meeting" at the Sunsets West Co-op: Initials KM actually posted the meeting at the post office and co-op - and even though it was only she and I there, she'd been researching on the net, brought a list of questions, and LISTENED to me. She was finishing my sentences. Over hot cups of chai, and in the course of the meeting, she learned how solar doesn't have to cost the price of a small house, and how it's best we don't hook into PUD. If the power goes out up to 8 times a year up here, we need batteries. 

I have the small-solar contact shop lined up: Anchor Marine, down in Port Angeles. It's a boat and RV shop. Of course, they already understand small solar. Ask for Eric.

Then we started discussing diagrams, and how much less it would cost her to find and build the parts. Which moved on to her finding and building the parts for other people - and - voila! - she creates her own job.

This would be at the dinky level. Unlike installing wood stoves, you're not going to kill yourself with a couple of batteries and solar panels, and some small 12-volt appliances or an inverter. You might startle yourself, but you're not going to burn down your house. Not if you have a lick of sense (and there are people up here who can blow themselves up making budder, so THINK).

How to not freak out PUD: remind them they could be the bulk near-cost supplier for parts for small solar builders and householders. It's the future - might as well make like a Boy Scout ("be prepared," not "despise gay people").

I might have launched the West End's first small-off-grid solar builder. Cross your fingers! Note: we agreed I'd not be part of any formed groups, because then, due to conflict of interest, I couldn't report to the papers. But I'll teach her and anybody else how to write press releases.

Now if I can just launch the person who will start ripping out car engines and replacing them with batteries for full electrical. If anybody can do it, it's this gang. Self-employment galore.

Note on Tesla: I think it's Arizona - or one of them thar western states - that has brought in Tesla for full electrical auto production - but lured 'em by loading the taxes they should be paying onto the citizenry.

WE, of course, know what happens when Boeing doesn't pay its taxes - everything falls apart. To our utter shame, we even lose our parks. And sell our forests to overseas hedge funds.

Butts About to Be Bitten

You know, I tried to leave you to your own devices, but I guess I don't get to do that.

I've been cornered by somebody who knows all about a local person who has been cutting timber in riparian areas, other people's property, and even cutting down an eagle tree. 

According to what's being said, somebody in Clallam County Government knew and did nothing about it. The person who came to me has your name.

Because cutting timber in flow areas could be contributing to road damage, and you never know if a car is going to go over - all of you had better hope a car doesn't go over the edge and kill somebody.

As it is, the road damage is going to probably make it necessary to move the road back. Into the clearcut property. Eminent Domain for the Greater Good. Screaming and the beating of breasts, but nothing to be done about it. Pointing and laughing.

Against my will, I think I may have fired up and begun to teach somebody a lot more involved in this community. An Aries born in the Year Of The Dog has horns and teeth.

It's a long worm has no turning. 

"Eco-Terrorist" on the Right Forehead.

New Year's Resolution: to paste the term "Eco-Terrorist" back onto the forehead of logging companies, newspapers owned by logging companies, bushmeating companies, ranchers and farmers who use our money to destroy wildlife and rivers, and anybody who thinks killing things is "fun," or life is to be "harvested." Carl Hiaasen can help. I wish I had an emoticon for "barracuda."

Like

Everybody Lost

First of all, Happy Krampus! 

Santa ain't coming to the Olympic Peninsula. The logging companies have stripped the place, and the developers are on the way.

No use writing about the place any more. Give it a decade or two, and there will be no more hunting and fishing, and locals will have to move out because the taxes will go up on the vacation homes and the towns becoming cities.

I guess nobody cared about living in the woods that much. The animals on the planet are quickly heading for extinction. Coyotes, crows, seagulls, domestic cats and dogs, and deer are probably all that makes it through. I know - "Deer?" You'd be amazed to find out where they show up, perfectly calm and happy where no humans even see them.

The churches are still trying to fool everybody into thinking they're going to heaven. If there WERE a heaven, it's referred to as a garden, or a city. If it's a garden - does anybody think the species that failed the "take care of my garden" test is going to be put anyplace but a burning clearcut? if it's a city - those places fill up with Liberals. Hell will be that there's noplace else to go, and people like me won't pick on Stupids for being stuck there, but we won't listen to their whining, either.

The wars? Well, it's the Darwin Award. Parents don't care about throwing away their DNA, so long as they can be the Twelfth Man in a football game with guns. I guess we'll have to go on paying for the military jobs, and getting nothing back in return. So much for the myth that the military took America out of the Depression. Since I pay the military's salaries, I'm not only their Commander-in-Chief, like all other citizens - I'm their boss. 

I've pretty much taught everybody how to send in articles and photos to newspapers. The editors will be very happy - they won't have to pay anybody. It might keep those papers going a little bit longer. They're not "news" papers, anyway - just rah-rah rags for the logging industry.

Now I have to decide if I should take advantage of the Lulu.com holiday deals, to get books for Emerald City, ShortRun, and my own comicon. 

I know, I know - Twain and Hiaasen say we need to keep fighting and stay pissed off all our lives. But Nature will get her own back on all of us, sooner or later. She always does.

I do more good drawing comic books, anyway. Go over to my site and get all the links for books, shows, and hopeful stuff. 

Because this place is fucked.

Sixty-Four White People

Happy Voter Sports party! 

Now I get who's helping to destroy what's left of the pittance parks out here - greedy farmers and descendants of land-grabbing settlers hooking up to developers, and not realizing they just went to bed with the hoof-and-mouth disease.

The editor of the Forks Forum - Forks Washington's hometown newspaper is running a campaign to restore Forks' white history, including columns about the "Real Forks." I suspect that one's because, rather than siding with pissed-off loggers who can't get the girls any more, everybody wants Twilight back, and are down to Twi/Squatch tours, and it always pisses off what's left of settlers when Custer gets his reputation held up for everybody to see.

And why? Because the parks "stole" Rialto Beach Mora Olympic National Park from her grandfather and supposedly turned it over to politicians to party in. Why? They're mad because they got paid and not in 2014 dollars? As for partying in the park - what? Like we all can't reserve the park to party in?

I'll bet part of the fight will be based in how much Injun blood they got in 'em. And you know the joke: "What do they call 64 white people?" "One full-blooded Cherokee." No, that's wrong. "One full-blooded Cherokee CHIEF." It's always a chief - when it's not a princess.

And you people with the Ancestor Club - why don't you be honest and just name it the "I Been here Screwing The Natives Longer Than You Club" and not be so embarrassing? 

My people got here in 1632, which means we've been bigger asswipes, longer. Might as well admit it... and not brag about it.

Speaking of loggers not getting the girls any more - dude on the bus, yesterday, talking about why the "selection of females is so small up here" - do you even OWN a mirror? Please don't tell me you think Twilight took your girlfriend away. Like you needed help with that.

(Hopefully this post will finally make our local Canadian-logging-company-owned newspapers make me go away. I never got paid enough, never knew if a story would be paid for, and had to write the most horribly censored schlock. No wonder Hemingway refused to have his newspaper articles published in his lifetime, and kept cats. I feel for you, dude.)

Cut-And-Paste With An Ax

Sigh. 

I don't argue with fakes. But sometimes you gotta.

May I tell the person who commented on this blog that, if you start your conversation with "I'm a conservationist," then that just puts the fakery feelers right up, because any DECENT person is a tree-hugger. It's only tree-haters who can't help what follows.

Tree-haters can't help it, because, as I've heard them admit, they love the sound of destruction as a tree comes down. There are photos of them all over the place, grinning like whaling captains at the stumps and carcasses of 3000-year-old forest-system-support trees. They might as well be standing on that stack of bison skulls and waving a couple more brain-boxes around. 

"Look at me! I killed something bigger than my penis!"

And look, people, they've been warning you for ages they don't think anybody but them gets to be on the planet. You've all seen those "Working forests = working families" signs. Those just mean, "Only us loggers have babies and everybody else needs to let us clearcut next to their community so the starving predators come into their yards!"

And then we get the goofy tree-hater industry talking points, like they're cutting and pasting the stuff off their logger class notes. Stuff like, "Well, you wouldn't have a house if it weren't for logging!" Oh, please. You had to go to balloon-framing and filling in the spaces between with toxic products, like a nasty industrial wattle-and-daub. What does The Goon Show say about England after the Luftwaffe's slum-clearing program (that's an English joke, not mine), and the reason England is now all red brick? "You can't get the wood, you know." And it's getting worse, because now we're building with chipboard, the glues of which are even worse and outgas longer. "Oh, I'm sick all the time!" wails our society. Ya THINK?

Here and there we see some decent wood, used as wood works better when there's patience in the grow and harvest, but most of it's going off for something poisonous. You people will wipe your asses with the lungs of the planet and then moan about anal cancer until the chickens come home to roost. I'm not saying that's what's causing it, but then again, it may just be the wood pulp in the food. Yup, you're eating wood like the Germans did after World War One, because that's how thin your food web has gotten. If you gotta eat trees you're in big trouble.

Oh, and I see how you loggers managed to get your hands on two parks and flatten them. It's practice for the Olympic National Park, if you can manage it. If you had your way, the whole thing would burn - including the Lake Crescent Lodge - so you could brag to each other in the taverns about how fast you took down the next generation's inheritance.

And the animals? Don't even try. Rayonier has three pages - logging and chemistry, a hunting page that's obviously like the African-based bushmeating that goes hand-in-hand with logging, and then - and does it surprise anybody? Development. I've seen it happen. My parent's generation and the older members of mine fucked up bigtime - and you're just keeping up the tradition.

Does anybody here need to be reminded that the conversation has begun that ebola came into human communities because infected animals had nowhere else to go? I hesitate to even mention it, because the American method of control would be what it's been all along - extermination of any animal populations bordering on human communities. Wiping out the people, plants and animals and replacing it with our domestic versions was the intent of our ancestors and religion, remember? Taming the wilderness. Making America safe for civilization. We've all heard the nice way of saying it, but Custer and Columbus have pretty much lost their reputations.

Stop arguing with me, loggers. Stop listening to them, people. They want to continue in an extremely destructive way of life, until there's nothing left. A real American doesn't stay and fight - we yell, "Road trip!" and get the Hell out of Dodge. But now there's noplace else to go. If you want to go any further west, you're gonna need a houseboat. Like Kon-Tiki.

But the conversation is beginning to work. Loggers and fisherfolk are bringing their kids in to talk about how to survive on this planet as modern people, and have room for everybody else. It's a lot of work. There will be a lot of tweaking, changing systems, having the courage to stay and make it work.

Your kids should be able to have homes, the internet, and a decent planet for all the peoples - including the animals and plants the native people and now science says we're all related to - to survive. Stop bragging about a bad past. Stop thinking us tree-huggers are the enemy. The corporations that are ripping down your peninsula, and sending most of the money to an out-of-country hedge-fund is what you should all be fighting.

Quit listening to the old cut-and-paste arguments and get to work. The old lazy things-as-they've-always-been aren't going to fly any more. That kite is going to come down harder than the ancient trees your granddaddy bragged about. Give your kids something to really be proud of. They're all you've got.

Same Old Navy, Same Old Tricks

Welp, the Navy fan-boys - and everybody IS a fanboy, about something - want to play with their toys again. Can they be trusted? Probably not. Anybody with guns that big is up to no good. And they - and whatever navies they're playing "Battleship" with - blew their cred a long time ago. 

My email, followed by the one I got - and no whining about "secrecy" on the internet. We all know that ship has sailed.

Immediate action needed New Naval Weapons testing threats here in Northwest

Actions 

Donna Barr

 

 

9:05 AM

 

To: gtwahl@fs.fed.us

Hello, Mr. Wahl.

We need more time for a hearing. Democracy is about everybody's voices.

We might consider that, if the Navy is willing to - jiggle - the debate about the harm to ocean sea mammals, can they be trusted to care about terrestrial creatures - including humans? 

Donna Barr

Actions 

Nancy Morris

 

 

10/22/14

 

 

Hello everyone:

Serious new threats here in the Northwest.   People in nearby Northwest cities are asking people to call (+1-360-956-2375) Mr. Greg Wahl, a Forest Service environmental coordinator , email is gtwahl@fs.fed.us .  Please ask for an extension beyond the October 31st  deadline for comments regarding the Warfare permit, so that people can have a public hearing on this proposed testing of weapons.  Please take a moment to call or email Greg Wahl directly.  See petition link for more details, but don't just sign the petition; again please call directly requesting extension on deadline for comments and a public hearing.  There is no time to lose.  The petition link does provide background information: https://www.change.org/p/us-navy-do-not-put-any-camper-sized-trucks-with-electromagnetic-radiation-equipment-to-conduct-war-exercises-with-military-aircraft-from-15-sites-in-clallam-jefferson-and-grays-harbor-counties

Greg Wahl/ Forest Service environmental coordinator

 1835 Black Lake Blvd. S.W.

 Olympia, WA 98512

 360-956-2375

Sad Cat Update

Update on the cat found in the bag: according to the police, animal had suffered trauma to the belly, probably auto accident or animal attack. Someone had attempted to treat it, but not a vet.

Remember, we have a vet here, now. Best Friends of Port Angeles has a Wednesday and Saturday clinic in Forks.

Port Angeles number: 360 452 7387

Forks number: 374 5566

We don't have to throw family members off a boat or into the surf.

Going To Tahiti

October. Cold, windy, leaves coming down.

Salmon in Trouble.

No?

Warm enough to wade and swim in the bay. Who needs to go to Tahiti? The Maori come to Neah Bay to make the babies dance happy. We call their weather The Pineapple Express. It's blowing snow-eater winds along the beaches and through the still-green alders.

More and more sunfishes, great whites and sperm whales showing up in the coastal waters and even in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 

Salmon don't like warm water.

Salmon-fishing industry, recreational and sports - fighting over the last remaining salmon, either wild or hatchery - is just making buggy whips. And whining and crying about who's going to get to catch the last salmon. I did that cartoon just for them. Greedy, future-blind morons.

I know about buggy whips. I work in the newspaper industry. Sooner or later the Fun Paper that doesn't pay its writers is going to kill both the paper-industry papers, and then up its ad rates. It won't be able to resist. Why would it? It doesn't pay its writers. If it will treat them like a harvest, it will harvest you.

Meanwhile, the actual writers will go off to blogs - like this one - and make money off their own ads. No more invoicing! No more running asses off all over town for stories and photos that get bumped because newspapers only make their own towns' buggy-whips. No more "Be nice to the logging industry, that owns our editorial board." No more writing in the fucking Associated Press style that Hemingway hated so much. Whee!

Clallam County is ruffling with an argument over electronic or manual meter-reading machines, or whatever they're called. WTF? Solar mini-grids are coming, whether the PUD and the County want it or not. The meter machines are just more buggy whips. It's going to be another case of "There go my people! I must catch up and lead them!"

No arts or dance or music anything but industrial-lineworker production classes in the schools? No entertainment-industry preparation? Go ahead, take away the money from the schools, let the corporate test-companies eat up your curriculum, and send your kids to my comicon, where they can get what they need. Forks is about to have its own arts festival. The smartest loggers and fisherfolk are bringing their kids, because they've seen the future. 

Even the guy who cuts our firewood knows the 200-year-old "jobs" paradigm is about to run out of the steam of cheap resources. And "even?" I swear, lately, talking to the guys with the little firewood trucks, they're more on top of this than most of the people squabbling down at Port Angeles City Hall. Now that Mike Doherty's retiring, are we going to get a commissioner to replace him - the kind of professional politician who comes out here once a week because he knows where the votes are? Then again, we can always train the next one. We all have email. Or at least disposable cell-phones. They're called public "servants," people.

Forests and fisheries? Going to be harvesting a lot of palm trees, there? Or scrub oaks? Or whatever can thrive here when the weather changes - and it is. Planning to move your business north? Someplace else that will put up with a lifestyle based on grab-and-shit, when there's nothing left to shove into your industry's maw? There's a reason we've been warning you TreeHaters and Animal Players for decades - because it's been coming. Thanks a lot for being greedy AND deaf.

You can't have shark derbies - the soupfin industry saw to that. Sunfish grow too slowly and are too rare to become a halibut replacement. Rockfish are actually scorpion fish - which are tropical - so maybe they'll be happier. Good old lings and greenlings - can they be hatcheried? I dunno.

Better get to work converting those fishing boats for bird-watching. Other people have had to do it. Birder life lists are imaginary - but they pay just as much as a salmon left rotting in the hot sun in a sports boat as the owner went off to lunch. 

Hm. The First Nations will have to change their traditional fish ceremonies, because they won't have salmon any more. Then again, they're resilient people; they survived us, didn't they? 

Just don't decide to go after Monster Whale instead of grey whale. Those big southern people are hot-tempered and impatient of canoes. Ask Captain Ahab.

The Amish Got It Right.

We need to adopt the Amish concept of Rumspringa - in which, when we're younger, we do some stuff that, later, we'd just as soon not be shunned for. 

If I were a judgmental person for silliness or just dumbness, practically everybody I know, including me, would be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

You're all lucky I'm just judgmental for bad stuff. If you've killed all the wolves in the mountains or cut down 3000-year-old trees, or joined the military from dumbness (oh, yes, I apply these mirrors to me, too), or left cats to rot in bags (The police are looking for you), you're not getting away with it around me. There may be no punishment, but there will be pointing and laughing. Or short, hard reports in the Anonymous Tip Line. 

But if you've done no more than wear your hair different, or THAT shirt, or made fun of your religion (who else has better right?), or crawled around drunk naked barking like a dog, or just crawled around on all fours in full fire gear so all the little school kids will learn you're not a monster but a friendly firefighter - and you're so ashamed you blame me for telling your story as fun, or silliness, or admirable - ask why you react like that.

Who's bullying you? Who's telling you, you can't have that past, just because you're trying to be somebody else, and have every right to re-invent yourself? Who's telling you in your religion you have to shut out a harmless joke when you were having fun? Who is shaming you for acting like an animal most everybody has one of up here - an admirable, noble, happy, brave, kind animal, at that?

Why this IPad Artstudio art?
Your guess is as good as mine.

Shame on them. Not you. Not me. Shame on THEM. If I told a silly story about you, it wasn't to shame you. You made me laugh back then. Or you revealed something about a group you belonged to that needed revealed. Or you did something good for children. 

Perhaps the bullies are going to tell you I'm a tattle-tale, not keeping all the secrets to myself. You know why people can't tattle on me? Because I don't have any secrets. I don't care. If I did something mean or cruel, I can't apologize and take it back or hide it. I did it. I'll own it. I'll try not to do it again - unless it's really funny and you laugh at me, and then I won't be able to help myself continuing the performance any more than the local old I'll-do-what-I-want AND play-music guy throwing his grandkid off the bridge to go not-quite bunjee-jumping (nobody was hurt. This is what rivers are for).

A bunch of bullies once called my brother a Tattle-tale. He turned and sneered, "You're not my friends."

If you do it to my friends or my community, and make them blush and hide, godlets help you if I find out. I'll draw pictures of your crap - and I'm a cartoonist. Nobody should be making you ashamed of your past, even if it was a little past the Rumspringa. 

"High school is never over."

(Oh, and if you don't want people telling stories about you and even tagging you - what are you doing on Facebook? REALLY?)

Note: I know local folks are not all as stupid as they pretend. They may BEGIN by telling you that "all these new flu's" comes from fruit flies (WTF?) but if I jump right in there and say, "No they don't, the flu evolves very quickly," they'll suddenly show they know better. Imagine living in a community where you have to test the waters for the mean and stupid. Gave an old native guy a ride, who started by ragging on "Indian nets," and I said, "Nah, nobody's nets are good." After that, we could talk. I hope to introduce the concept of "Bullshit!" to the community.

Oh, and you with the logging truck, running your engine in a sick woman's yard. If you mean to piss me off, I grew up with the things. I pretty much engine-deaf. But where I grew up, I think it was a law that they were not to be revved up in a municipal neighborhood. Now why would that be a law? Because some numbnuts Tree-hater had done it one time too many, probably next door to the county judge or something. As the Clallam County clerk whimpered to me, "Please, don't make new law." The reason you're not allowed to keep an elephant in your basement in one of the States is because somebody let an elephant die down there - and the fire department had to clean out the goop and bones.

We Told You So.

Cleaning files, found this from 2009. Really? It still applies? Can Americans not learn?

Losers

Ryan's pissed off.

He wants to know why

Why the No-Wars don't care

That he has to die.

“I'm fighting for freedom.

I'm fighting for them.

What's with all these pussies?

What about all our men?

“While we take the bullets

From rag-heads and sheikhs.

These losers sit safe;

Just where are these freaks?”

He can't understand

Why these peaceniks won't come,

Why they just shake their heads

And act like he's dumb.

When he talks about “freedom,”

They tell him “oil money.”

When he says, “democracy,”

They say, “Ain't that funny.”

And this crap they all talk

about banking his sign-up?

He bought a new ride;

Those jerk-offs can line up

And kiss him right here

Where the sun never shines.

They're traitors, all yearning

For un-American times.

They tell him they're tired

Of gagging like lushes

on Nixon's bad booze:

Cheney, Reagan, the Bushes.

They say, time the people

Who helped make the mash,

Start cleaning the stills out,

Without taking the cash.

They drag up old history

And all of that bother:

“The equivalent of

Our Founding Fathers.”

The British, the Shah,

Who got out and who got in,

The Iran-Iraq war;

His head starts to spin.

His strong point was sports,

Anything with a ball,

Like he's got two of now,

And they've got fuck-all.

They told him “Don't go,”

They warned him invasion

Would catch him resentment,

Confusion, contagion.

They warn him his money

Is to buy him new legs,

'Cuz the government won't,

When he's shipped back like eggs.

Smooth on his knees, where

IED's took his shins;

That bonus-with-interest

meant to build him new pins.

But a man has to do

When a man has no choice.

Third rotation, or sixth,

One more silenced voice.

Too many rotations

Will end like they said,

Blown up in the desert,

Shipped back maimed or dead.

No babies for him,

No grandkids for mama,

His gene-bags stop here;

still blaming Osama.

While all those smart-asses

Who knew “freedom” ain't “oil,”

Will have kids and grandkids,

Their futures unspoiled.

God gave us a brain,

To use when we need.

If you'll fight without thinking,

You won't get to breed.

The thinkers and artists,

The ones who can read,

The ones who know history,

Knew where it would lead.

The old Vietnam question,

Not a moment more tame:

The rich gave their war --

And nobody came.

Donna Barr © 2009