March 27, 2003
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Lessee… where was I?
Oh, the keyboard. It’s working just fine since I cleaned all the cat hair, crumbs and stuff out of it. Only problem I see… uh, make that “hear”… now is that without the cushion of cat hair under the keys, it’s a lot noisier when Greyfox hammers on it. For me, getting a new keyboard will be delayed as long as possible, and preferably when we do need one we will find one with large print keys. Believe me, for a perfectionist, getting all those large-print stickers aligned just right on the keys so her myopic old fart can see to hunt and peck, is an all-day job. This picky Virgo has better ways to spend her time.
My work table is now occupied by a few thousand bits of tumble-polished lapis lazuli, to be sorted and paired for earrings. That will not keep me from doing readings in between the work on the stones. I’ll just lay the cards out on top of the lapis.
I was bursting with a rant last night while one or the other of the guys was at this computer, so I banged this out on the laptop:
Was it ignorance, stupidity, greed, or what?
I ask silly questions like that and Greyfox laughs at me. He likes to laugh at my naiveté. It’s fair, I know. I get enough laughs at his expense, so it balances out.
The three of us in this household irritate and hassle each other on a regular basis, but we give each other lots of laughter as well, so it evens out. One of the things we enjoy sharing a few rueful laughs over is our mutual bafflement bordering on puking revulsion at the political crap in our state.
It had to be ignorance, stupidity, greed, gullibility, cupidity, demagoguery and chicanery that got the current Republican administration into office. The previous Lt. Gov., Fran Ulmer, lost the election by talking truthfully about the problems the state faces. Murkowski told these compatriots of ours what they wanted to hear, on the “promise ‘em anything” principle. He promised jobs and no taxes and new schools.
Now not only has the man put his daughter into his vacant US Senate seat, he has put a fat half dozen or so of his political cronies into high-paid do-nothing jobs (doing nothing but making life hard for the career bureaucrats now under their command, who have to try to keep their departments running despite the new boss). He also instituted a one-two combination of a long list of new “user fee” taxes together with cuts in services.
But worst of all, in our opinion, he has set the foxes to mind the henhouse. We laugh at the absurdity of it, but it’s not really funny. The previous “game board”, that body that makes fish and wildlife policy, was a balance of business and industry people, subsistence and sport hunters , commercial and sport fishermen, and environmentalists. Now all the environmentalists are gone and sports and commercial interests are predominating over subsistence concerns.
There is a “wolf problem” in the interior. The plan I heard the other day was to appropriate money for a few weeks of intensive helicopter wolf hunting this summer, and if that doesn’t take care of the problem… well, hell, people… that’s the place where I tuned out the report. I don’t know what their second phase is going to be if shooting wolves from helicopters for a few weeks doesn’t do the job. Do I want to know? I’m sure I’ll find out; no hurry.
This is a disastrous plan not just for the wolves. Our fisheries used to be Alaska’s biggest industry. Then the fisheries were overfished and the ocean has been warming up and going toxic… so oil supplanted fish. Oil and tourists are almost all there is to bring money into this state. Already, there is a tourism boycott being organized in sympathy with the wolves. As if that would stop the killing. AS IF….
And it isn’t just the governor and his appointees making nasty plans. The legislature in Juneau is considering a new tax on tourists, a $100 head tax for all cruise ship passengers. Lobbyists for the cruise lines are trying to discourage this, feeling that it will cut into their business. It is a powerful lobby, so there’s some hope on that one.
The lobbyists are warning the goverment that it’s cutting its own throat. People are calling the government in Juneau from all over the planet, telling them they won’t be spending their summer here because we’re shooting wolves from helicopters. From what I hear from that bun-faced asshat Murkowski, I don’t think he cares.
We already have depressed tourism because of terrorism and the security backlash that makes air travel more of a nightmare than ever. Now the administration seems bent on putting one of the state’s top two industries out of its misery. Murkowski’s interests aren’t in the tourism field, apparently. He is, however, showing a lot of interest in oil development.
What we have here is a state with the biggest remaining wilderness on the planet, a fragile ecosystem already compromised by human predation, global warming and resource exploitation. As threatened as our wilderness is, people come here from everywhere to be awed by it. It’s awesome. We could regulate the tourism, protect the land and wildlife from human pressure, and for a while we were moving in that direction.
Now, the push is on for development and resource exploitation. Visitors are welcomed out of one side of the mouth and repulsed out of the other. White man speak with forked tongue. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m not going in after it.
Comments (6)
I can’t keep one thought out of my mind. “So what are you up to today?” “Well, I’ll be shooting wolves from a helicopter.” “Okay, have fun.” Certainly not like, “I’ll be running some errands” or anything along those lines. Not to make light of the situation in any way and pushing the entire concept aside for a different discussion, the words just sound absurd.
When my parents call today, which they will inevitably do, and ask me what I’m up to, I think I’m going to tell them that I’ll be playing wolf round-up with an AK-47 and a helicopter. I think they need just one more thing to think I have completely lost my mind.
D-, sometimes you just have to laugh (because the reality of it will only make you cry)
The foxes are speaking with forked tongue in many other henhouses too. We have an alarming situation in this country when truth-speakers can’t get elected, Democrats don’t know how to say no, and Republicans are allowed to be the imperialists we always knew they were…
asshat… that sounds like something I would say.. hehe.
i get really pissed off because no matter how much money i give to the environmentalists (who sometimes arent even the ones doing the right thing) or how often i bug congress, i have to sit by and watch the earth be torn up for our own profit with no regard for the other beings that we share the planet with. I could go on for pages.
That a Republican holds down Alaska is one of the most baffling things in the world to me.
This blog so saddened me. How awful to kill an animal in that way…discouraging to see such blatant government corruption…horrible that we are ruining such a place.
Sickening, but as always…so well said.