I love Oregon. I was born in Oregon. But the state has just gone to the dogs.
I'm not very political. I don't like Oregon democrats because they harbored a child molester, who was Portland's mayor and then governor. Many of them knew and did nothing, went along like a pack of sheep. So I don't vote for Oregon Democrats for high office. I don't vote for Republicans, out of a loathing for the party's general lack of values.
Anyhow, now Oregon is attacking the poor with all sorts of bills that make it harder to survive. Business taxes that get passed to customers and now a truly ridiculous cap and trade bill that will increase prices, in some cases, like gas costs, drastically, and do nothing to reduce carbon and methane in the world's atmosphere.
Its a feather in hat bill, I would guess, because its useless in reducing world atmospheric carbon, methane, and does so much damage to average people by increasing costs. Oregon has not even restricted use of dirty diesel, which is the teller, in knowing the state doesn't give a crap about air pollution and that the cap and trade bill is all about glory and money.
The state will rake in money though, and spend it, probably unwisely. While the poor struggle to stay off the streets. We already have a huge homeless population in Oregon and are the 2nd costliest state in which to live. Why make it worse?
Why not make it worse, I suppose they think in Salem, although I have no idea how a politician thinks. I just know if that cap and trade bill passes life will get even harder for many many people while the politicians bask in....whatever it is they bask in.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Nothing To It
What does one say, to arrive at a new colony, get out of the car to discuss with the cats' caretaker, how we will proceed, when she blur...
-
Black Pearl is supposed to go to a home on Monday. The people adopting both her and Toby wanted her records, to be sure she has been fixed,...
-
Guess who I caught this evening? Yup. Both these big guys. They can be neutered side by side! I also caught a young brown tabby tux and ... -
I made it back to Waldo. Monday I took five cats from Gills Landing colony to be fixed and tested at the Salem clinic. All five, four gi...
Sadly shafting the poor (and trying to pretend they deserve it) is all too common world-wide. As is protecting their rich buddies. Hiss and spit.
ReplyDeleteI live in Houston. We have homeless and twice as many mega churches
ReplyDeleteYet you say you love history. If Strayer will pardon me for taking up so much of her comment section, I will ask what is it that you love? When I think of Houston, I think of heat and humidity, a 90 mile beltway, and a place where anyone can build anything anywhere (there being no land use planning), but I also think of mild winters, good medical care, an interesting history, and a short drive to Galveston.
DeleteWhat does loving history have to do with this?
DeleteAkasha, I have no idea what he was referring to there.
DeleteI meant Houston, which you said, on your profile page, you love.
DeleteP.S. I surely substituted history for Houston because I had just been thinking about the Spanish mission of Goliad at which Santa Ana ordered the murders of hundreds of defenders after their surrender. Why he wasn't executed as a war criminal, I have no idea. Something that I love about both your area and my homeland in southwest Mississippi is their interesting history.
DeleteI think diesel is dying a natural death aside from with trucks and other heavy duty vehicles. Diesel cars are very much out of favour here now. I don't know what the bill is, but I think I can guess. Perhaps politicians don't bask, rather they wallow.
ReplyDeletewe have a massive diesel problem in Oregon. Buses, even school buses, trucks, big rigs, all run on filthy spewing black diesel here, causing massive air pollution problems, especially in densely populated areas. It's disgusting.
DeleteOne to two ton, extended cab, privately owned trucks are very popular here, and many of them run on diesel. Large SUVs are also very popular here, the days when even a nod to environmentalism having passed.
DeleteSnow, you got it right there. Long ago, everyone to join in and be green and clean and not smoke up the air with icky diesel, but not anymore, there's some strange rebellious self destructive pride in driving the biggest rig you can, even when you can't afford fuel for it, and making sure to blast out huge clouds of black diesel smoke at every green light. Fouling up public spaces with trash seems to go right along with it. There's been no respect for decades for anything but oneself, I think is the problem. Anyhow.....We have a lot of very filthy producing vehicles, large and small, running around Oregon, choking up the air that we all breath.
DeleteFascinating post. I really like knowing about you beyond your cat rescue--as interesting and meaningful at it is. I moved to Oregon from Mississippi in 1986, and I still feel like a refugee, although I didn't feel that I belonged in Mississippi then, and I sure wouldn't feel like I belonged there now. When I came here, I liked the mild summers, but the summers aren't quite so mild now, and I do weary of months of yearly drought followed by months of short days, gray skies, and drizzle. Before coming here, I hadn't lived anywhere but Mississippi, so I was unaware of the things I would miss about the South, or the things I would dislike about Oregon (armadillos and cardinals, for example). Of course, it goes the other way too, because I sure the hell don't miss fire ants. Another problem I have here is my Southern accent, although it has faded enough that it's no longer for the first thing that people comment upon when they meet me. I just wish I could say that I really love Oregon.
ReplyDeleteI love southern accents, Snow. I bet it can really be culture shock to move from the deep south to Oregon. I've never really been anywhere outside of Oregon, except a couple of years spent in the Napa valley and a few years working in Alaska off and on. That's it for my exposure to anything but Oregon. The last decades I've been totally limited, in what I've seen of this world, or even of Oregon, rarely leaving the mid valley of Oregon. And in the 80's, I never left Corvallis, having no car and no way to go anywhere except where I could walk. Most of my isolation from anything but a small area of Oregon has been due to no car, half broken down cars or about to break down at any minute cars. I would not like fire ants.
Delete"Anyhow.....We have a lot of very filthy producing vehicles, large and small, running around Oregon, choking up the air that we all breath."
DeleteAnd then there's the noise that diesels make. As for the large vehicles, I think one motive in buying them is to assure that if you have a head-on collision, you will "win."
"I bet it can really be culture shock to move from the deep south to Oregon."
At first--and despite the prejudice I often met due to my accent, moving to Oregon was like coming home because I was past ready to be out of the conservative religiosity of the Deep South, and because I met so many people who also came here for the alternative culture. Sadly, with age all feeling of being a vital part of an alternative culture has passed, and all those people who left their families behind seem surrounded by family. While this is still a liberal area, it's no longer notable for its friendliness to alternative culture, and I'm no longer interested in that anyway.
Peggy and I used to travel for two to three months a year (we were teachers), during which we camped our way through all of lower Canada and 48 American states, most of them many times. She then went on to visit Alaska and Hawaii with other people. We had imagined that cats would leave us feeling less tied-down than dogs, but our four cats are on three different diets, and if we're not around (like if we set food dispensers on timers), one of them will try to eat everyone else's food, and then throw it up. We could, of course, get a cat sitter, but one of our guys throws up everything he eats if there's the least change in routine, so that's not workable either. We could take dogs along with us, but with cats, we're stuck at home, although Peggy takes trips on her own, and I care a lot more about my cats than I do about traveling.
I can't really travel either, but its not because of the cats so much--money and I'm not so into travelling alone anymore. I used to go everywhere alone, hiking, even climbing mountains, in Alaska no less, cross country treks across glaciers, no biggee when young. Now I like to enjoy people but have no one really to enjoy things with and am content with my cats on my lap and a book to read. I wish I could, however, develop my "japanese toilet" idea for litter boxes, that would allow me more freedom, should I suddenly want it, and come into money, to leave for more than a night. I'd connect the Japanese style toilet, or made of a large low shower stall, to the sewer or just an RV septic tank under house with easy access for removal to drain, have stainless steel or plastic plates, with non absorbable litter attached, that would lift vertical on a timer with an alarm to sound first, giving cats time to exit, and sprayers that would then come on to wash everything down the hole beneath the plates. I've wanted to make this for a long time but don't have the know how. But it could not be that hard. I just need to get it done one of these months. These would be large capacity for my house of cats and I just want it simple and my litter box cleaning days done with. I know it would work.
DeleteI don't get the part about the alarm--shouldn't the unit simply have a sensor so that it would know then the cat had exited, because, by golly, let the cat get sprayed once, and that would be the end of that.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you came back alive from crossing those Alaska glaciers (as you surely know, Denali is one dangerously hellacious peak to climb). Peggy has climbed all of the Oregon Cascade peaks, and she also did St. Helen's, Dog Mountain, and Adams in Washington plus Lassen in California. No matter how long and hard she trained, she never did get to where she could tolerate altitude well, so she puked her way to a lot of mountain tops on climbs from which others turned back despite being in better shape than she. We used to read every book about climbing that the library had, and I recall one story in which two men were crossing a glacier in Alaska, and one of them fell in. The other couldn't reach him so he waited at the top until his friend became delirious and died that night. There's a really good film--and book--about climbing in South America that I'm confident you would enjoy. It's called "Touching the Void." Then there's the famous book and film about Everest entitled "Into Thin Air." A Washington climber whose writings (and stories about him) might interest you was Willi Unsoeld, who was finally killed on Rainier. Unsoeld had a daughter whom he named Nanda Devi after a mountain in the Himilayas. He finally took her to climb that peak, and she died on it.
I've read almost all Krakaur's books including Into Thin Air, loved it. And Unsoeld's too. I didn't know Peggy is a climber. I climbed small mountains on the Kenai, because I lived there. I think the tallest was just over 8000 feet. I had no real gear except an ice ax that I still have, for memories sake. It's an old school wooden ice ax, nothing like the gear of today. The alarm was to get cats out of the way of mechanical arms lifting apart and up the two parts to the elevated floor, to which the non absorbable litter would be attached. The two floor parts would maybe be pulled to the sides and sprayers behind them would loosen any poop attached to fall and be washed to the drain.
DeleteI used to love to glacade down snow fields, it was a hoot, with my ice ax as a brake. If the sprayers were placed right, there would be no need for the false floor of the "litter box" to split and raise vertically for cleaning with sprayers via mechanical arms. I just would not want the "litter" to be sprayed to be sprayed to one end, so I thought about attachment via strands off the non absorbable litter used, whatever that may be, rubber mulch type, to a false floor through small holes. I'd just have to build a prototype and experiment. I thought about a catch basket for poop, in a large hole drain too. The catch basket would go down a foot or more and be full of small holes so urine would pass through and I could pull out the basket to dump the poop but that is likely not needed if all goes into a holding tank or just the sewer system.
DeleteI took risks then I suppose, Snow, in Alaska, but I was young then, and isn't that the way of the young? I like to think they were calculated risks. But I was stupid in many ways. I was terrified of bears after a couple of close encounters up there. They're so big and smelly and frightening. So I when I went alone hiking or climbing, I put my food in a bear box half mile from camp, often atop a huge rock I'd have to climb. I took nothing with any smell, no toothpaste or deodorant or even citronella for the mosquitoes. I took a .44 magnum pistol for awhile but after being chased up a tree by a bear that was so huge and terrifying up close, I sold that gun, realizing it was like a pee shooter in the face of that monster. After that I was so attuned to the smell of a bear, I got hired sometimes to watch livestock or track them. In those days, I became an excellent tracker and reader of trail sign, especially for bears. I've lost all those skills by now.
DeleteI don't know that a .44 magnum would be "like a pea shooter," but I do know that bears can climb trees, or if the tree is too small for them to climb, they can shake you out of it. Peggy and I used to carry a .357, but, due to it's size, switched to a .38 special. We carried guns for people rather than bears.
DeletePeggy did some of her climbing with a friend named Walt, and the rest of it with the Obsidians. I initially trusted Walt, but finally realized that he was death waiting to happen. For instance, with almost no practice, he would tie himself to Peggy, and if he fell into a crevasse, she was supposed to stop his fall. Yeah, right! She would have followed him in.