Holiday Thoughts from Bear Bait
Years ago, due to end of fiscal quarter issues, the time between Christmas and New Years was full of USFS timber auction sales that needed my attention. Lots of snowy traipses in the woods, chaining up the pickmeup truck. I would guess now the timber staff and the business offices are empty, with employees off to the far corners of the country and the earth, taking is easy and some time off from sitting in front of computers creating scenarios never to be carried out, scenarios that are only conjecture at best.
The real issue to pound into the ground is the stake through the heart of Oregon’s once enviable economy. Oregon is now a colony, even having been abandoned by the MegaPulps and the TimberGiants. REIT and TIMO business plans do not include log processing. I had occasion to drive up the freeway to Wilsonville and passed several log trucks hauling nice looking second growth export logs with Weyerhaeuser tags on them. Gotta supply the new industrial nations of the world with raw material.
And a trucking outfit, that I once knew as a log hauler for Longview Fiber gyppo loggers, passed me dragging a Schnitzer Salvage trailer full of scrap metal. That, too, will be sliced and diced and shipped off the Far East in containers to be hand gleaned for metal other than ferrous, and then smelted to make that doodad you can’t live without which Walmart carries. Colony USA feeding the machinery of the former third world.
So we don’t use our Federal timber, and we really don’t have the building industry or dollars needed to build homes, so it does not matter at this time. We have logs on private land in surplus, and the need for quarterly profits to feed the shareholders of the REITS and TIMOs. Ergo, export logs are rolling down the highways. That is a blessing, you know, because it does represent domestic jobs from the woods to the cargo dock and onto ships. The ships and sailors are not American, though.
The place where the trees once grew is now a contact zone for the sun with the soil, and soon the herbicides will have killed all the plant life and through that dead zone will be planted new conifers, free of competition for several years, and the trees will flourish and grow and soonn be an unhealthy, crowded forest due to regulatory overplanting to avoid fines and poor publicity. Regulated forestry requires successful replanting of Douglas-fir and total tree cover in a set number of years. None of those nasty opening in the canopy for meadows, fens, brakes, prairies. Total tree cover. Non-diverse total tree cover. Think about it.
So not cutting and preserving is like buying the best cottage cheese and putting it in the refrigerator. Sooner than later the cottage cheese will grow mold and then slowly turn to slimy sludge. Forests do the same, but over a longer time frame.
Poor Mike [thanks for the pity - ed.] is trying his best to convey that fact to a bevy of experts whose ears have been plugged with wax, their eyes blinded by NGO greed and misinformation, litigation, and a Congress that is so involved in itself, that there is no way to extract their heads from hiding in that dark place to address the reality of the world. Maybe Sen. Wyden, whose prostate is to be carved on, will see daylight someday. Although that would require replacing his brain before they go after his prostate. Even if just temporarily. Put him on an artificial brain for a few months. DeFazio, too. Interesting to see someone whose head has made the journey so far that when he eats, you can see his head behind his teeth… odd sight that. With a little more facial hair his visage would be truly like looking into front to front mirrors.
“Protect” the spotted owl until it is extinct. Protect Caspian terns and double crested cormorants with Congressional insanity and watch them extirpate Columbia River salmon, all the while blaming dams which must be removed, while the birds congregate and feed on salmon smolts from islands of dredge spoils created by the Corps of Engineers… which also is responsible for the dams… Into the looking-glass, Alice.
We are there. Burn the forests because that can be construed as “natural”. Natural: that is some Robert Crumb observation of a drug addled world of the ’60s and ’70s. To be expected of the USFS new old guard, a hiring haven for worn out hippies and failed communists from the dope growing communes.
But a few experienced USFS people are still there, observing the new breed putting crap into one end of a computer and getting crap out the other end in a meaningless, wasteful, never ending progression of perpetual bureaucracy. At least from a landfill you can trap the methane and make some power. Do the same at a Regional Office, and you get a black hole, either filled with nothing or the heaviest load of crap physics can conjure.
You’re not wasting your time, Mike, if you can some gain standing on the issue. At least you might get that. It is hard to obtain. Unless, of course, you are an NGO with package after package of standing all nicely wrapped and put under your tree by compliant and friendly courts, all greased with EAJA lubricant not available to the hoi poloi.
The United States suffers rule by a tyrannical minority of power brokers and their lapdog Senate. The “fly over” states cannot bring themselves to that realization, and they elect the most liberal robbers of the public estate to represent them. If you truly wanted to change the US, all the money to instigate change would go to elect Independent candidates from the “fly over” states, the states with three or fewer Representatives in the House, such as Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, NoDak, and the like. A townhouse apartment or a condominium having one vote and a tree farm or a ranch having one vote isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The tyranny of the urban majority is to be tempered with a vigorous and robust Senate with every State on equal footing regardless of the number of voters.
Meanwhile, back in third world Oreygawn, our claim to fame is Oregon football. Sort of like New Zealand rugby, Indian cricket, and Basque handball. Major players from third world wannabe countries and states, and a circus for the masses.
I especially like Oregon’s low placing in education in the Nation (USA), which is itself now ranked low among the top 50 countries in literacy, educational accomplishment, and science. Oregon is bottom of a low-tier barrel, an also-ran colony producing blue collar jobs and exporting the very resources that once made us great.
The US, too, was once a valued-added exporter of ideas and products in the forms of motor trucks and cars, heavy equipment, aeroplanes, rocketry, machine tools, etc. The Environmental Lobby has stripped us of that living standard and is hell bent on driving us all to the bottom of the pit of poverty in some vain attempt to be “green” and “save the earth”.
Meanwhile, “anomaly” weather is freezing the balls off the brass monkey all along the Eastern Seaboard, well into the Midwest and Deep South. We are getting “relief” from global warming. Relish it. Roll in it. And for damned sure, don’t use any of that low sulfur coal to keep warm or to keep the heater running or the lights on.
Freezing fog and a dead elk on 99W near Suver. Driven out of the coast range by snow, the Roosevelt elk have moved from the canyons of the Coast Range to the banks of the Willamette River, the riparian edges of grass seed and row crop fields. That’s where the wolves will find them in the near future. I sort of like that. Having wolves in the ‘burbs eating the deer and elk seeking refuge near humanity is a just reward for urbanistas. That a cow elk will pound your puppy into the earth until not even the bobbed tail is exposed is a lesson to be learned.
But for damned sure, don’t cut another tree on public land. We need the smoke. The last time there were big forest fires south of the Willamette Valley, the smoke became a reason to end for all time agricultural burning. That none had taken place, and that the smoke was from forests aflame on unmanaged public lands, was artfully dodged by the urbanista lawyers, lobbyists, legislators and voters. So if you meet a smoking good looking woman, you can use her existence to preclude using wood to heat a house. After all, you don’t know if she came from a house with wood heat. All you know is that she is smokin’ good looking. Reasonable thinking in the State of Idiocy, once called Oregon and pronounced Oreygun.
On to 2011 and more progress in the voyage from greatness to mediocrity, and now to Third World complacency. Draw that cartoon of Allah and get martyrized. Or is that marionetterized?
This infidel wishes you all a Merry Christmas… and a better New Year… better than this one or the last one, or the several before that.
- bear bait
