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I have walked through a crowd of onlookers before to get to a Citizen being pinned by a Portland Officer to the pavement; over a simple situation that had escalated into an intense confrontation.  The cop had gone too far in my estimation and a call by me to city hall was followed by a return call from both a PR person on the force and then the officer himself.

Then we have the young woman at the Max station who was quiclky rearrested after setting fire to her room, after her home release, following the Max incident trial.  I believe that in this case the perpetrator was the one to fly out of bounds quickest; and to her obvious peril.   Twice.

And now Aaron Campbell, shot while probably a little insane, clinically or not, over the death of his brother.  Acting unpredictably.  And he is shot by an officer who maintains he was attempting to keep Aaron from reaching cover, as he watched what looked like Aaron going for a gun. 

As a society we are letting the bar on what is considered legitimate conduct in public, slip farther and farther toward the obscene, immoral, ridiculous, lacivious, confrontational and generally dark side of human nature.  

The economy is in great turmiol and many people are exhausting their coping skills on other more basic needs like lights and heat and food; and the day to day grind of bad news and a dim outlook has many people stressed to the limit.  

And as this is taking place;  We are also less likely every day to correct those around us when they are over the line socially, in nearly any setting, preferring instead to wait until there is a huge problem and then seeking to have the police deal with it.  

We need to turn down the volume, unplug, reconnect and sustain each other if we are to survive.  Without strong connections between people we will increasingly depend on police, and the government in general, to itervene and be our "decider"; and the results will continue to look more fascist every day.

posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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We have two dogs and need 3 bags a day for them every day and a couple of extras on weekends.

We end up buying a separate specialty pet waste disposal bag because we use recyclable cloth bags for most shopping.  This means a new factory to supply these bags, a separate delivery system, and seperate space in the store.

We get plastic bags from our friends.

We put dog feces in the Portland Parks trash.  They have quit using liners in the trash cans. 

Some place in europe quit using the bags and found out their total footprint increased.

posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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So out at the intersection of Vadis and Milne roads, just there on the south side of HWY 26, one finds 33 full sized mobile homes on an acre of land.    Ugly, no grass, no trees, no privacy and what a beautiful adornment to the side of a main highway.  Whose operation is that, might I ask; and why is that okay and it isn't okay for a family to place a manufactured home on their farmland near the big house for their kids or a second source of income?

Why not just put a high rise apartment there.  It would look better.

All of this high talk of uban growth boundaries to save farm land is really just a bunch of claptrap invented when it became clear that the hippies were coming to stay and there had to be a way to stop them from creating a bunch of commune clusters on the road to the coast. We couldn't have that.  A bunch of mellow people getting together and buying up farmland communally, growing them funky organic vegetables and raising goats, all without pesticides or herbicides.  No sir.  NIMBY.  Next thing you know they are going to want to home school their kids. 

Far better to condense that land under the control of a few wealthy land owners and let them rent out 33 mobile homes on an acre to transient farm labor.  Now that is the way to get 'er done. 

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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Knowing your grower is the only way.  This is the powerful tool of the CSA and this is why I have freezer full of $14 chickens.  This is why I have my own chickens and this is why my urban Portland back yard is a garden and not a field of perfect blades of grass.  And when I open the next vacuum pack of Salmon I will know the exact day it was caught and the lure used to put it in my boat.

This past summer I noticed a troubling new trend at local farmer's markets.  Many vendors were claiming to sell "Organic" produce but when pressed on the issue were not in fact certified by Oregon Tilth or anybody else.  They claimed it was an expensive and arduous process to become certified and while that may well be true it is no reason to lie about it. 

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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When I go to the store I want to know where my food was grown.  Nothing from China ever comes home here because they have totally lost their credibility at my house.  

If it is seafood I want to know the country of origin and the harvest technique.  Farmed salmon is in the same boat as any food from China; as its production is creating numerous problems; from seal lice infestation of native stocks of fish as they swim by the pens; to the destruction of real wild food fish that are being captured and ground into pelletized food for the farmed salmon at a great loss of valuable protein in the big picture. 

Shrimp from Indonesia and other locations in Asia are often farmed using biologically unsustainable techniques in water that is polluted and unfit for my canoe let alone for the production of foodstuffs.

I like organic food because I believe its production is the only way out of our current mindless degredation of farm land and because I do not believe the synergistic effects of all of the chemicals used in the current commercial model have been adequately studied; either in and on the food, or on the valuable and limited source of fresh water around the planet; as concentrated effluent from production facilities make their way to streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean.  Additionally many of the drugs that are used to treat chickens and other livestock are finding their way directly into our children and acting as powerful endocrine disruptors as indicated by widespread evidence in the literature for at least the past ten years.  Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness. 

 Greed is a powerful tool to help the affluent sleep at night.  Imagine how many of the 168 people arrested at the Delmonte Fresh plant in North Portland two years ago would have been able to understand english enough to take guidance from an english speaking supervisor on keeping the public safe as they handled our food, or would have been willing to raise the alarm if something dangerous was being done at that one plant while their very livelyhood was at stake; and you can begin to come to grips with why low paid workers all across the nation, often here illegally, willingly turn a blind eye to bad practices.

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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One word explains why we will fail in Afghanistan if we are counting on warriors to win the battle.

Terrain.

It is all fine and good from a military standpoint to go chase the bad men around in the relatively flat terrain of the sandbox that is Iraq.  But Afghanistan is nothing like a sandbox and especially the border region with Pakistan. 

There are basically no roads.  The terrain is all up or down.  You could nuke an entire valley and the valley a half-mile away would be basically unaffected.  So would the next valley a half-mile the other way.  So would the additional 1000 little valleys in each direction for the next 200 miles.

Lots of armies have tried to take on this region.  It is a logistics nightmare.  Think of diesel fuel at $400 a gallon by the time it is delivered.  Think of every meal and roll of toilet paper and tampon and round of ammunition that can only be delivered to the fight with a helicopter.

Think about paying a million a year to fill a single pair of boots on the ground.  Some say that is what it is going to cost.

There is no government. There is no infrastructure.  There is no economy save the drug trade.  None of the people that live in the border region want us there or have any reason to trust us.  The bad men sit on the mountain ridges and shoot mortars and small arms fire down into the remote American military outposts where there is literally no cover from above.  And if we rally and try to chase them they disappear into the woods just like an Oregon Coast Range Blactail Deer.  

We had a good chance to change things after we helped the people in their war against the Russians.  We had some friends and we could have opened some schools and showed them how to mine marble and maybe could have built some water treatment and a few hospitals but we just walked away.

Now our only option is to put a price on the heads of the bad men.  A bounty if you will.  For what it is going to cost us to fill a thousand sets of boots with precious young Americans we could have a billion dollars to use for a bounty.  

Only the people that live there can catch the bad men.

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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Five Foot Four, 160 pounds.  Call her a 12 year old if you like, but a much more accurate description would be "Adult Sized Minor".  

Add to that the facts that she had already been in so much trouble on previous occcasions on Light Rail that she was not only on an Exclusion List, but was known On Sight by Officer Humphreys, in a crowd.

I watched the video and saw a Cat-Fighting Shadow of an adult-sized  person making every attempt to get loose and get away.

We need to let the cops do their job.  They need to know we "Have Their Back" when they are working with the most difficult part of society. 

A lot of the people the Police deal with have almost no sense of Proper Conduct in public, at home, or anywhere else.  They think Squalor is normal.  They think poverty is normal.  They think violence is normal.

One report I read out of the recent reporting on the Officers Killed near Tacoma said the the person they are looking for had told a friend a day or two ahead of the crime that he was going to "kill some cops and watch the news".   This fellow needed to be back in jail right then, but because his "friend" had no sense of what is normal he continued to roam the streets a free man.

And we need to hold parents more accountable for the conduct of their children.  What was a 12 year old kid doing out so late at night with such a crummy group of friends.

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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Chinook and Coho also spawn right in the Mainstem. 

But here are a couple of other places that Fall Chinook and Coho should be spawning today that they aren't.

In the Columbia Slough and its tributaries in North and Northeast Portland.  I know old timers that caught Steelhead there as recently as the 1940's.  The Big Pipe project is working on this but it will never really recover the Samonids until the surface water itself; from the north and northeast neighborhoods, and all of the commercial user's properties, is also made habitable; as in clean and cold and shaded and disrupted by structure.

Also, in all of the little tributaries across what is now downtown Portland.  In some communities there have been major efforts to daylight such tributaries which were buried in the past because they were overtaken by sewage.   Many of the original sewer trunks lay in the pathways of historic wateways.  But now, for the most part, the sewage and storm water have once again been separated and this means that we are now running what could be beautiful fish filled tributaries under shaded watercourse throughout the city, instead, under several feet of concrete below ground. 

There are many other places throughout the metro region where salmon could easily spawn, but for the urban runoff and pollution in those streams. 

The concrete bottom line is that Salmon need Cold Clean Water and Gravel, and Shade to Spawn.  The returning fish have long ago eaten their last meal in the Salt by the time they arrive but the new smolts will need breakfast lunch and dinner insects and euphasids every step of the way and that means at least a little ecosystem along the way because they are also going to need some shade (think Alder).  It is like growing tomatoes, You can grow them in a bucket if it is the right size, and you can provide every single nutrient; but it is a lot easier to grow them in an able patch of ground as part of a larger garden.

I like to imagine the best possible outcome of every opportunity before I start into action.  If we provide a perfect environment within our Metro area for the Salmon we will be providing something much greater to each other as humans along the way.  They were here long before us and it would be good to keep that in mind.

posted 3 years, 9 months ago
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20,000,000 naturally producing wild fish reduced to 3,000,000 hatchery and wild fish.  I recently found a Corps of Engineers graph online that showed the historic returns of Salmon to the Columbia River all the way back to the early, white pioneer days.   This graph clearly demonstrates the precipitous drop in salmon populations that was brought on by the development of our ability to preserve salmon in a can and ship its protein around the world. 

If one reads up on the impact of commercial fishing, or looks at any of the graphs that follow the rise and fall of the salmon cannery business on the lower Columbia River, it is easy to see why the Salmon was in great jeopardy long before a single yard of concrete was placed at Bonneville.  At one point there were literally tens of thousands of gill nets and pen nets and salmon wheels on the Columbia.    Every little sidestream in the Columbia basin had been dammed for physical hydropower to mill lumber or later to mill grain; long before electrical generation.   The graph also steepens noteably at the point in time when first pesticides, and then herbicides, were introduced to farming in the region.   

A couple of retired Oregon State Police officers with long experience in enforcing fishing regulations have been encouraging the ODFW to change commercial gill net procedures in the Columbia because of widespread cheating by these commercial fishermen in the river.  But alas they are still fishing in the deep of the night when what could be a powerful army of observers (sport fishermen) are asleep in their beds;  And, no onboard count need be kept as they retrieve their catch so any number of fish can be spirited away in the dark of night by other faster boats and quickly on their way to Tokyo or Atlanta in boxes of dry ice.

And why is it against Federal law for the State of Oregon to impose greater restrictions on the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides than federal law requires.  Because the pesticide industry lobbied congress to prevent Oregon from creating its own rules. 

Oregon has long led the nation in environmental law.  It is time for us to take another step in that same direction.

posted 3 years, 9 months ago
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It should be harder to purchase lawn chemicals than to purchase spray paint.  Purchase of spray paint in Portland now requires store operators to unlock a cage to access spray paint and requires purchasers to provide positive identification.

Furthermore, in his final judgement in 2004, Federal judge Coughenour listed 38 chemicals with impact on salmon and required "Salmon Hazard" warnings to be issued to all purchasers of seven different pesticides.  These warnings are never issued in Portland and were apparently thrown away by participating stores.

Enforcement of existing laws and rulings would go a long way to helping the Salmon

posted 3 years, 9 months ago
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