06/12/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
1. One day it’s “selective thinning” by timber companies that will save Oregon’s wilderness areas from grotesque human depredation….And the next? For those of us who still believe in empirical evidence rather then heuristic sophistry, science shows that logging big dead trees after a wildfire and planting young ones makes future fires worse. (And it doesn’t even take that much science to come up with that assessment: I learned in the fourth grade that when trees die they become ‘nurse trees’ providing the nutrients for more trees. Fer chrissake, you don’t even need to get through the fourth grade to learn this – a short walk in the woods should suffice as a demonstration…)
2. “I remember when all this used to be forest”: Oregonians get to vote on a property rights bill again this November. The bill isn’t much of an improvement on Measure 37, but it does put the damper on the bulldozers to some small degree. (Edward Abby, where are you now that we need you most?)
3. (Not) Laughing Gas: Oregon LNG, the new, metastasized Calpine wants its 117-mile LNG pipeline and it wants it now. The pipeline is going to run from Warrenton on the mouth of the Columbia River all the way to the unsuspecting town of Mollala. And Oregon LNG (Catchy little name, no?) is just one of five such bad ideas waiting to happen. None of the five has formally applied to FERC…Hmmm, smells like a fix is in somewhere. Don’t be surprised when ground is broken, permits retrofitted and Ron Wyden and the Oregon Economic Development Commission throw themselves a party…
4. How many laws does it take to unscrew a metal halide light bulb? Just one… but people actually have to suffer permanent injury before it can be enacted.
5. Fish & Ships: NOAA Fisheries Service has denied a special permit to allow drift gill net boats to troll for swordfish and thresher shark in waters designated as a preserve for endangered leatherback turtles. The turtles actually only have to manage to hang on for another decade or so until the sharks and swordfish have been fished to extinction or industrialized nations eat themselves to death…
6. Oregon unemployment numbers are down and spirits of the wealthy are up. It’s hard to swallow that huge mouthful of $60 steak with all those faces pressed up against the window, isn’t it? The numbers may be down, but do they count those who have given up all hope of finding work and are now enjoying a life of crime and/or incarceration? What about the people who are working three part time minimum wage jobs and are maxed out on the payday loan line?
7. The Iraq Study Group now says it isn’t so sure that pulling combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008 remains valid. (Pull ‘em out! The Pentagon’s private Armies of the Night are more than capable of protecting America’s privatized shadow government in Iraq, whose role is, of course, to govern privatized Iraqi ministries and institution from the safety of fortified structures build by private contractors. It didn’t take America long to make the leap from sanctifying the Corporate Citizen to the apotheosis of the Corporate Nation…
8. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Get Out of Jail Free: Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wants Scooter Libby to go straight to prison (Where Libby will doubtless have ample opportunity to do some research for his next book; rape from the other point of view. (I say we lock him in a cage with a bear hopped up on Viagra to train him not to fall in love with his captors…).
9. As predicted, delaying the no-confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales had the GOP’s desired effect: It provided time for the likes of Trent Lott to do some arm-twisting and deal fixing.
10. Proof the Human Race has ceased evolving: A majority of Republicans are Creationists – paramecium that celebrate Christmas and Easter.
11. The Pentagon is selling used F-14 parts to Iran. And just to show the world that this isn’t true at all, the House voted a second time to ban the Pentagon from selling leftover F-14 fighter jet parts sought by Iran. (What was not said is that the Pentagon – dare I say the entire US military establishment? – is so deeply and irreversibly privatized that Iran should have no trouble whatsoever getting those parts. Never had, never will.)
12. Not As Seen on TV: As the world’s top military powers go about the delicate business of dismantling stockpiles of obsolete nuclear arms, more ordnance of all kinds are entering the international arms Black Market (You should see some of the catalogues…Awesome!). The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute issued a report last week that underlines the dangers presented by this flood of ersatz nuclear gizmos. By the time you see it on TV, it will be too late..
13. Military recruiting is down. (I guess the guys are signing on with Blackwater. The pay is better and I hear the benefits are great. Plus they give you flack jackets made out of real Kevlar instead of the version offered by the Army made from old copies of ‘Playboy’ and duct tape…)
14. Senior American military officers have told the Jerusalem Post that war planning is at the “Iran ready” stage. Whether or not the American public is at the “Iran ready” stage is not known…I suppose that’s why they told the Jerusalem Post instead of the Washington Post.
15. Somewhere Over The Green Zone, Bluebirds Fly…The Pentagon apparently once was developing a “gay bomb.” (Okay chemtrail watchers…are you happy now?)
16. Afghan police mistook US troops on a nighttime mission for Taliban fighters and opened fire on them early today.
17. The CIA has been unsuccessful thus far in its mission to infiltrate white Americans into radical Sudanese groups in the Middle East (Possibly because the Americans kept calling their contacts, ‘Dude’ and inserting the word ‘like’ into every sentence.). So here’s the next best idea: We are going to use Arab-speaking Sudanese citizens. (But wait, you say…Didn’t President Bush himself just call for additional sanctions against the Sudanese government over the genocide in Darfur? Think: We already are selling F-14 parts to Iran and we routinely do ‘business’ with Colombia…)
18. First it was the Americans passing around handfuls of amphetamines and steroids to the troops …Now the British are on board the Magic Drug Bus. This, despite the fact that when accused of one atrocity or another perpetrated against civilians, said troops blame, ‘the fog of war’, the sense of camaraderie and the drugs. What ever happened to ‘Lessons Learned’?
19. In Australia, A “cyclone-like” monster storm has shut down most of New South Wales.
20. And the same goes for China. A monster storm has closed down most of the southern part of the country. Guangzhou is where all the foreign factories making all the American and European products sold in the Big Box world are located….In case any of you are Wall Street watchers…you might want to try it this week…. fascinating!
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