Screw those military broads.
When I was in the US army in the ’70’s, if a woman got pregnant, she was thrown out of the service.
We had a little song about it (to the tune of Pretty Baby):
“If you’re nervous in the service, and you want to get a break, have a baby, have a baby.”
I don’t think I need to make further comment:
Defense Authorization
The Senate tabled a bipartisan amendment offered by Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) that would have restored reproductive health care services to women serving in the military overseas. The Murray-Snowe amendment was narrowly defeated by a vote of 50 to 49 during debate of the fiscal 2001 Defense Authorization bill (S. 2549). Current law prohibits female military personnel overseas from obtaining abortions with their own private funds in military hospitals. The abortion ban forces servicewomen and military dependents overseas to choose between seeking services at potentially substandard facilities or making a costly trip back to the U.S. It is estimated that more than 100,000 women – active servicewomen, spouses and dependents of military personnel – live on military bases overseas and rely on military hospitals for their reproductive health care.
The House defeated a similar amendment to its version of the defense bill last month.
Tourism 101
Folks want to put in a bio-fuel plant up here. It will run on wood waste from logging. They say it will attract tourists who will see it as a green-friendly move.
But how will those tourists come up here if they have to drive by the clear-cuts that provide the wood waste?
Anybody who thinks that green dollars will be spent on logging museums has not been doing their homework. The kind of tourists who come out to see forests do not view them as a monoculture “crop.” They view them as ecosystems.
Ecosystems are far too complicated for humans to deal with over long term, at least in monocultural terms. Cropping sees alders as competative “weeds” and poisons them out. Ecosystems require the alders as the nitrogen pump that will support the future wood crop. Ecosystems pump oxygen back into the massive planetary air system — a system far too vast and complicated for us to control or provide for.
Cropping = short term. Ecosystem = long term.
Or, to put it in generational terms:
“I only care about my own livlihood.” vs. “Where are my grandkids going to live?”
Ecosystem tourism no more wants to visit a museum of frontier logging than they want to see the history of the buffalo hunts — except as a planetary mistake. If people want those green dollars they’re just going to have to accept that those are histories that will not attract a living.
Because the people who don’t care about the green are the people who can live with nothing but concrete.
Sequim, anyone?
(While I’m at it, I’ll note that, as the child of a paper-mill town, fermenting wood stinks to high heaven, and the massive chemical influx sends out fumes that peel paint off the walls. Fermentation-mill towns are not tourism towns. They stink, they need masses of water — which we’re already short of — and they will knock health costs through the roof. THINK. RESEARCH. FIND OUT FIRST.
Oh, and as a artist and publisher: wood paper is the crappiest paper on the planet. And not just for the high acid count. It’s only useful for toilet paper. That’s right — we’re flushing our oxygen-production system down the crapper, along with our water.)
How to plan a war
A lot of people are talking about the Iraq “war” being mismanaged or badly planned. They are asking why there was no exit strategy.
You legally get into a war when somebody attacks you. And then you’re expected to attack the people who actually attacked you, not somebody you’d like to attack. This kind of war is never planned, and nobody’s thinking about how to get out of it. It’s an emergency, or panic response.
No one who has ever planned a war has had an exit strategy. Any war that has been planned has only had one goal: to conquer, stay, own and rule. That is a premediated war. That is illegal under international law.
There’s a legal definition for planning a premeditated war against someone who has not attacked you:
War crime.
