So what’s new about Iraq?
Oh, what’s the big deal with leaving Iraq? We KNOW what will happen — we’ve been before.
We ran from Vietnam. Things are fine, now.
As for “cut and run” — we’ll have to do it sooner or later. We can’t afford this war. Our machines are too expensive.
It took us and the Russians years to beat little bitty short-resource Germany. We don’t have the resources or the allies to beat any insurgents in any occupation.
Yankee, come home.
Soldiers
When soldiers kill women and children, we shrug and say, "That's war."
When a couple soldiers go missing, we wring our hands and forget that THAT is "just war."
When and how did soldiers become the most important people in our society?
The Chinese say: "Don't waste good metal to make a horseshoe nail; don't waste a good man as a soldier."
Remember the kind of places where soldiers were and are the most important people? Where they had first choice of the best and the right to respect and life, before anybody else in the society? Remember what happens to those societies, and what soldiers do to people?
Do we really want to live in a place like that?
A Bridge To Somewhere
The beautiful curving bridge in the State Park in Clallam Bay is accessible again.
The Clallam River had torn apart the bridgehead on the gravel-based parkland and spit, and left the sturdy bridge base stranded with one end hanging over open river. The Clallam Bay/Sekiu Chamber of Commerce obtained FEMA funds to move the bridge to a more stable location. Washington State Parks and Fisheries were working with FEMA to bridge the river without disturbing its flow or fishing capability. In the course of the 2005-2006 winter storms, the bay built the pebble strip back to the base of the bridge. Local children saw a chance to re-establish access, and took it.
Ted Smith of Washington State Parks said, 'I saw the creative stuff going on, and I knew people needed a legitimate site access."
Smith visited the park to see the original ramp, which had been built by local children using driftwood and nails. He was accompanied by a coastal geologist who hadn't been associated with the original bridge project, and who could offer an unbiased opinion.
According to the geologist, the ramp could be in place for fifty years — or only five. He said that the river was so dynamic no one could predict what it would do.
The day after Smith received a photograph of the kids' project, a new ramp, lightly built but with a handrail, appeared in its place. Someone in the community had taken the problem into their own hands.
"No one knows who built it," said Smith. "It's the mystery ramp."
Smith called the Parks Department's Construction Maintenance Superintendant, Jim Neill. Neill contacted the Park's marine crew, which maintains an inventory of dock parts.
"They happened to have a spare ramp," said Smith. "They more or less organized it. Then, whoa! They just got it in."
Smith thanked a construction crew from Clallam County, who showed up early on Thursday, June 15, to assist the marine crew with the ramp construction. The marine crew brought the bridge over the ramp on an excavator, then both crews cooperated to finish the ramp in a few hours.
"It all just happened," said Smith. "It's the magic bridge."
The challenge now is to re-direct the FEMA money for re-constructing access on the bridge's present site. The Emergency Management District in Olympia is working with FEMA on funding usage.
"FEMA has been very helpful," said Smith. "We're thinking of something articulatable, that raises up and down."
The Clallam River empties to the west of the bridge, just north of the park camping area, rendering the camping spots inaccessible to the public through the park itself. Smith says that temporary structures are being considered. No further details for future bridge construction were available at this time.
What a Crock
Gee, Secretary of Veterans' Affairs, thanks for the letter about the "stolen" electronic data (oh, come on, we all know the guy sold it), including all our social security numbers.
As for the VA being on top of the situation — our bank was frantically informing us to yank our ssan off their website as a user name, about a week before anybody opened their mouth on the VA's end. The VA knew knew, and only today are they getting us these warning letters.
Then again, the Army Corps of Engineers built the levees around New Orleans. And Marines can't tell the enemy from a family at home in their own house.
Put on a uniform, lose your brains. Or expect us who used to wear uniforms that ours are still gone.
Clallam Bay 2006 Graduation
Video of the graduating class. Sorry about the low lighting conditions.
Herman Flies again
Herman the tame pigeon is still flying around up here. He's a red-and-white fancy breed. He thinks he's a crow and there's one he hangs out with.
Herman flies around high in the air below eagles and a known peregrine falcon's nest. He sleeps up under the eaves of a local house, and weathered 80 mph gales last winter.
Tough bird.
Magical Fishing
Fishermen up here are wingeing on about there being no fish for the derbies this year.
Humans have a tendency to magical thinking: they think wild animals just poof into place for them to eat or play with. They don't seem to recognize a species has to breed and grow and not be stressed. Like the cod industry. Thinking of it as an "industry" was the mind-set that wrecked it in the first place. Giving people prizes for what they catch is just paying somebody to go out and play catch-and-release.
Catch-and-release: that's just tormenting animals for the fun of it. Hell of a thing to teach children; maybe it's what's at the bottom of the kids who grow up to torment prisoners, touching their wee-wees and sicking dogs on them. Once somebody is classified as an animal we can catch, then we get to torment them. If we can do it to a fish, we can do it to a human.
We should catch and keep the first two of whatever we get on the line. It's all good. These people claim to be in touch with the wild, and they don't even know how to prepare a bullhead or a dogfish for the pan. Meat is meat is meat — you just have to know how to treat each kind of meat. There are people who will poach salmon (shudder). Hell, there are people who fry fresh horse-meat.
There's been a breeding-ground proposal: no fish within the breeding ground, so when fish get big and need to extend their range, they can wander out they can tend to be larger.
Don't bother them in their homes. We should be happy that kicking in a fish's home door doesn't add to an insurgency, like it does when we do it to each other. Then again, learning to harrass and torment wild animals wherever they live may ultimately be building an insurgency — just not out of the fish.
Sooner or later, we reap what we sow.
Caveat: I love to fish. But I catch what I can, and eat what I catch, and then I go home. I kill quick, and I explain to kids that poking a fish in the eye is disrespecting their food. I've actually heard a father, when throwing away most of a badly-filleted salmon carcass — with plenty of meat and the head still on it — "That's just crab bait." Well, maybe it is, but these animals died so we could live. A whole religious group stole that line, for an imaginary god — and then ignore and despise the animals who really do die for their life.
If you catch it, thank it. Kill it quick. Care for the meat. Clean it properly, leaving little waste. Cook it properly. Teach your children to respect it. Be a decent omnivore. In the long run, you'll have more to eat.
You reap what you sow.
Photos!
Before you wonder why I took so many baseball shots, I was BEGGED to do it. Please, gods, no more sports. It's like being pelted to death with popcorn: Hit the ball with the stick, run in circles. Hit the ball with the stick, run in circles. Hit the ball with the stick, run in circles. Repeat until brains melt. They must be training these kids to work in factories, where repetative movement is important.
Where was Christ?
Where was Christ on the battlefield?
All you ever hear from Christers is "Whose penis is going into what hole, when, where, how?" It's all their damn religion seems to be about.
A lot of the troops in Iraq spew the Christer crap — and supposedly this is a religion of peace.
But when it comes to kicking down people's doors and charging in and murdering them — all of a sudden these guys don't seem to know what not to do.
The excuse has been given that these people were "frustrated." Yeah? Well, there are a lot of frustrated parents who take out their mad-on at the boss on their kids. Or on their spouses.
Where in the bible does it say "Thou shalt not kick a dog because thou canst not kick whom thou wanst to kick?"
No bloody where, that's where. Not a damn word.
In the movie Gross Pointe Blank, Blank explains that he had to disappear because he realized he "Just had to kill somebody."
I want to know how many of these Christers just dumped their penis-sniffing religion on the battlefield because they "just had to kill somebody."
I don't know how many bad words we can use here: hypocrisy, cowardice, stupidity.
Stupid, stupid soldier people.
The RedCoats are Here.
Now you all recognize this from American history classes that got to the Revolution:
"It's not fair! It's not sporting! They're hiding behind trees and refusing to come out and fight like men! These aren't real soldiers. These are a ragtag mob!"
That, of course, would be the British.
Now see if you can recognize these lines:
"These people don't come out and take us on like real soldiers. We're not able to tell who is an insurgent. We don't want to kill women and children, but you can't tell them apart."
What goes around comes around. Sooner or later, everybody is the RedCoats.
As a woman, I simply don't believe in the Rules of War. Kipling himself said that females, in "merciless feminine fray," do not understand any fight that is not 100% to the death. If we're going to fight, it won't be for fun and games. It will be to protect the home and our children. Getting involved in war threatens those very homes and children.
War is what happens when you screw up. It's what happens when you can't handle relationships. But if you're going to get involved in it, then go all the way. Kill everybody, any time, and get it over with. This is an insurgent war, and the only factories for an insurgent war are women, and the children — the future weapons — that they produce. The only way to beat insurgents is to take out all of them, and all their families.
If you don't want to face this, then you need not to go to war in the first place. It's a brutal, stupid business, that will simply sow the seeds for the next war, one way or another.
The ONLY people on this planet who ever learned — win or lose — that war is stupid, pointless, inhumane, ultimately a loss, forever and forever, is the Germans. It's not because they lost; the American south lost, and those evil southern values of slavery and militarism and Christian fundamentalism are seeping back out from under the rock where they were whacked down in 1865.
Nobody on this planet is as smart about war as the Germans.
Huh. Maybe everybody else got the chimp genes.
