Category: American wilderness

What Keeps Montana’s Timber Industry Alive: Is it Socialism or Fascism?

Please note facsi on either side of the American flag. Fasci will remain for Trump’s State of the Union address.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during an address to Congress on March 3, 2015 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Netanyahu was invited by House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress without informing the White House. AFP PHOTO/MANDEL NGANMANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

In the not so recent past Montana’s private logging contractors and saw-mill owners operated predominantly on privately-owned lands.  The old growth was “high-graded” (stripped off), and much of that land was sold off to the federal government and real estate corporations (REITs).  In other words, after the easy-to-access, high-value old growth on private land was liquidated, the timber industry has been going through a structural transition (merger, acquisition, liquidation) for decades. This is the trend. Mills have closed, workforce numbers declined, and the “timber economy” in Montana and other Northern Rockies states has trended downward, with no end in sight. 

A significant portion of all wood-fiber production has relocated to the Southeastern states for a variety of quite logical, ecological and economic reasons.

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The One

OK, it is time to fess up here. I have a Facebook account and check it daily. I watch TV, though not news. I like intrigue and good acting, and there is not much to be had. I am currently watching Season Three of Bosch, the detective created by Michael Connelly, and played sort of okay by Titus Welliver. (I think the lead character should be taller and have more muscular legs. This guy is supposedly a former Green Beret but looks more like a Lt. Detective Fife. [Now that I published that I realized it is false. Welliver is a very muscular man.]

This has nothing to do with Bosch. It’s not like Game of Thrones, where they routinely kill off lead actors. Bosch always wins. Boring. What I notice, and I know we all do, is that every time Bosch ends up in court, the judge is either going to be a woman, or a black, usually both. Why do they do that? It is so predictable. If I ever see a white male judge on TV, as we have in real life, I think it will signal end times.

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Bloggers hiring lawyers?

I am somewhat in hibernation, as ideas for posts are just not happening. But I did happen on this story wherein one blogger is suing another for defamation, written by a man who defamed my late older brother, a Catholic priest, by implying (or stating outright) that he was part of the pedophile scandal. For that I put a permanent ban on him, the only time I have done such a thing.

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Get it down

I have a new computer, and am faced with the onerous task of transferring what is on the old to the new. In the past I have simply moved everything, no effort required.  But now as I approach my 70th year, I am for-real retired, and want to do some pruning. With advances in mechanical capacities, each of us is given enough computer memory to easily contain everything we’ve ever written or photographed. Most of it is forgettable, but with computer memory, it is stored. I want to live a good long time, so don’t go morose on me, but having experienced the passing of my entire birth family, I realized that with their deaths go their computers and every memory stored thereon. Only things on paper survive.
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On the changing of minds

“I remember once, it was in a bar, during the 1930s, and there was a drunken debate going on that was trending on towards violence when something so unusual happened that everyone froze in place. The silence was like a soft winter snow falling in the woods. Everyone looked on in wonder. A guy, sitting in the corner and surrounded by empty and half-full glasses of beer, announced that he was persuaded by the logic of his opponent to change his mind on a subject.

It had never happened before. It has never happened since.” (Quoting my grandfather)

Since I put up an ill-conceived piece below, properly dismantled by a commenter, I am making amends. This piece I guarantee to strike a note. It is called How I changed my Mind … About Global Warming. Here is the opening paragraph:

Most, if not all, people would consider themselves to be open-minded. Yet, if you ask someone to name an important belief that they have changed their mind about, in response to evidence and/or logic, most struggle to give even one example.

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Cranky thoughts

The following words are by Alan O. Kelly of Carlsbad, California, printed in the February 1952 issue of Scientific Monthly, without further comment.

“It is our observation that the great majority of people who deliberately decide to be scientists, and so educate themselves, are those who are psychologically unfit it to be real creative thinkers. They go into science because they are afraid to think for themselves. They lack self-confidence; they want to lean on the Orthodox, great authorities. The average scientist never dreams of questioning authority. …

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Dancers and prancers

See PS below

We were watching West Side Story, the 1961 movie, a couple of nights ago, and it had such an other-world feel to it. I had never sat through it before (we only made it to an old-time blockbuster movie concept, “intermission”). What was it like to be alive in 1961 when this soft, homoerotic movie (music by Leonard Bernstein) garnered ten Oscars?

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Impenetrable barriers, us and them

It does not hurt, on our little isolated island here at this blog, to try to walk in the shoes of regular people.

I recently became reacquainted with a man I knew years ago, a newscaster, and became Facebook friends. He knows everyone who is anyone, and his list of friends includes people whose names I recognize as important in the Montana sense. They were or are in news, politics, business. They are each in a cloud, as we all are, a dense smokescreen difficult to penetrate called “me.”

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Alone on a mountaintop

This exchange was enlightening, an honest and skeptical commenter stopped by and offered the following:

“I stumbled onto this site while researching John Denver’s death. While perusing several blog posts here, I noticed that it is common to question the authenticity of song writers. Why is this? Why suggest that ghost writers have more writing talent than the person who made the song famous? Also, don’t you guys realize that people actually do take drugs, abuse alcohol, and then suffer the consequences? Why is every celebrity death a hoax? Frankly, it isn’t possible for the required number of people involved to hide all the evidence of these so-called faked deaths. ‘Two can keep a secret, but only of one is dead.'”

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The New Green Deal and the coming Dark Ages

A while back I offered up what I called “One Last Climate Post“, and indeed I stand by that. My reasoning was that the debate that I was reviewing was very old and that all the players were well known. The “science” was new to me, and I was treading in deep water, not knowing enough about it to be writing about it.

Since that time I have been immersed in the science, and now feel much more comfortable with it. It is accessible to all of us, and not hard to comprehend. All we need do is look around us. For every scary claim by climate scaremongers and doomsayers, there is ample evidence that the planet is doing well. Polar bears are many and healthy, storms, fires, droughts are lessening in number and intensity. Carbon is increasing in the atmosphere, and the positive effects are now coming to fruition with a greener planet. Gradual warming, as has been going on for 400 years now, is a positive thing. Where the Roman Warm Period gave rise to an empire and an explosion in technology, the Little Ice Age brought with it the Dark Ages and Black Death. Our current warm period is yielding more food, more and healthier people and amazing technology.

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