MaxRedline

Alaska Has It Right

An unknown number of Cypress Island escapees in Puget Sound are being hunted down by authorities, but it should never have happened in the first place. Fish farms are illegal in Alaska, but permitted in the waters off British Columbia and Washington state. In Washington, that may change:

SEATTLE  — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has directed the Department of Ecology to put on hold any new permits for net pens after thousands of Atlantic salmon escaped into Puget Sound this month from a damaged salmon farm.

There's an understatement; that farm wasn't just damaged, it completely collapsed. Canada's Cooke Aquaculture, which owns the farm, blamed the incident on high tides and currents, although in fact neither were at abnormal levels. There is no good reason to permit farming of non-native salmon here in the Pacific Northwest.

That's a native Chinook salmon at the top of the photo, and a farmed Atlantic salmon at the bottom.

Personally, I don't buy anything other than wild-caught native fish. Farm raised trout and Atlantics are fed colorants in their pelleted food, as otherwise the flesh would be off-white. They're also lower in nutrients such as Omega-3. For years, in fact, I caught my own fish. Not so much any more. That's primarily for two reasons: the state kept jacking up the cost of fishing licenses, while at the same time shutting down some of my favorite relatively near-by fishing spots.

It got to where there was little point in continuing.

So I buy them. I periodically make the trek to Cascade Locks to support the Indian fishers for salmon.

Washington is the only West Coast state with an open-water Atlantic salmon farming industry. Alaska and California ban such operations, and while Oregon does not disallow them, none currently operate in the state.

Oregon needs to disallow them as well.

As in make it illegal.

 

 

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Post-Eclipse Pandemonium

As might have been expected, most everybody tied to leave at the same time after the eclipse ended, and it's going about as well as you might imagine: northbound I-5 is jammed up, and there have been several wrecks to add to the fun. Last I heard, ODOT was guessing that the 50 mile trip from Salem to Portland may take as long as five hours; longer for those hoping to cross the Columbia River into Washington and other points north.

Ditto for highways 26 & 97, which are packed with miles-long lines of cars, campers, etc. and feature wrecks as well. Traffic's generally at a standstill. Government agencies had been asserting that the eclipse would provide a great test of their emergency response procedures. Those could probably use a little more work.

We just walked out into the front yard and viewed the event from there. No driving, no hassle. Even Green&Sustainable!

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MaxRedline: Eclipse Madness

MaxRedline: ECLIPSE!

ECLIPSE!

The freakshow is officially open in Oregon. The backup of cars and RVs was 30 miles long outside of Prineville yesterday. I saw one group that put their vehicle in neutral and then got out and started pushing it down the highway in order to save gas (which, by the way, has shot up in price in central Oregon - if you can even find it). But when traffic is only moving at two or three or five miles per hour, that's probably a good approach.

It does raise the question: how many of these folks are congregants in the church of Mann-Made Global Warming?

Heck, we've got people out here from New York and further. Car rentals? Forget it. The big agencies like Hertz and Avis are flat out of them, although I did see one guy who found a car to rent - for $800 a day. Unlimited mileage, presumably. Hope he can find gas for the tank;  this is sort of like the gas lines of 1973. AAA's getting a lot of calls:

The volume of calls to AAA for roadside assistance is two or three times normal, with dead batteries, tire problems, lock outs and empty gas tanks the most common problems, in that order.

The Navajo Nation will only get a partial eclipse, but nonetheless, most of their people will stay indoors rather than look.

The moon and the sun are quite sacred to Navajos and they give respect during their union by looking away during the event.

Personally, I find all of the uproar perplexing. February 26, 1979 - we had an amazing total solar eclipse (but not the internet, and less media chatter). So I was completely alone when it came blasting up the Columbia River Gorge, and it was unbelievable.

I was just east of The Dalles, dead center in the path of totality. Portland was, as usual, cloud-covered, so I went east. Perfect. I even got a few photos on 35 mm. film. I also discovered that the solar radiation screws up your 35 mm. film. Oh well, I did recover a shot of the "diamond ring" effect.

Amusingly, media today brays that the Monday eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime event, which is likely what's driving so many out-of-staters here. But the 79 one didn't get that kind of hype, so there were no crowds (at least, not where I was). And that one truly was a once in a lifetime event.

A Sweetheart

The Charlottesville terrorist, it appears, has a history of violence, his wheelchair-bound mother having called 911 on multiple occasions following his repeated assaults.

And you know things are pretty screwy when the Germans are denouncing the "repulsive, naked racism" on display last weekend in Virginia. They are, however, aware of no connection between the American neo-nazi idiots and their own German flavor.

As Dr. Carol Swain observed as far back as 2002, there is a difference between white nationalism and white supremacists. As she notes - and she's black, herself - the former are simply sick and tired of being browbeaten and guilt-tripped with stuff like "white privilege"; the latter are solid racists who actually believe that whites are inherently superior to all other people.

Dr. Swain underscored that white nationalism is different from the racist white supremacy movement, even though the left-wing media and liberals purposely conflate the two. “I distinguish it from white supremacy because the people who were involved [in the white nationalism movement] were more intellectual,” said Swain, a graduate of Yale Law School. “They were not espousing racial violence or using epithets, but they had grievances. They felt that white people’s rights were being trampled on and no one was speaking up or listening to their grievances.”

Swain said the white nationalism movement took off — long before Trump took office — because whites were being marginalized and disenfranchised after decades of affirmative action and other government programs designed to benefit minorities.

Today's white nationalists, in short, took the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to heart when he spoke of his dream of a day when people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Yet in the ensuing decades, everything seems to be about skin color. Universities regularly reject highly qualified white applicants in favor of less qualified minority students because they want to maintain certain ratios in their portfolio. At Washington state's Evergreen College just recently, all hell broke loose after "minority students" demanded a "white-free day" - a day on which no white people would be allowed on campus. Surprisingly, a lot of white folks didn't go along.

Naturally, some riots occurred. The college shut down completely for several days.

The rise of white nationalism came about as a direct result of this sort of idiocy. The wns aren't racist, and they're not white supremacists. But increasingly, they are demanding. And what they're demanding is equal treatment, an end to the continual denigration, and a modicum of respect.

Refugees And Issues They Bring

Among the many things that flummox them are flush toilets.

The mayor of Hardheim, a small town in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, raised the issue in October - and was ridiculed for thinking it necessary to admonish the town's asylum-seekers not to relieve themselves in gardens, parks, behind hedges and behind bushes. Squat toilets are traditional in many parts of the Muslim world. Baffled by ordinary Western-style flush toilets, refugees nationwide have squatted on toilet rims or the floor of the bathroom when nature called; others have relieved themselves in the shower stalls, leaving behind human excrement on the floors.

It depends on where they're from; many have never encountered this thing we call toilet paper, for one thing. Many Arabs use water and the fingers on their left hand to clean up (thus, why the left hand is considered "unclean"), although some use rocks. In other places, such as in some parts of India, people still go outdoors to defecate even though outhouses have been constructed in a number of villages.

Here, alarmist Cliff Mass at UW claims that as temperatures rise we'll have our own refugee crisis on the west side of the Pacific Northwest because "climate refugees" from the southwest and other parts of the country will converge here. Sure. People running from heat are certain to head to an area where almost no one has air conditioning. But at least they'll be familiar with how toilets are used.

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Armless Archer Wins

Matt Stutzman has a tagline: "What's your excuse?"

WESTFIELD, Ind. – A man born with no arms defied the odds and took home first place at a national archery competition in Westfield over the weekend.

He uses his feet. He competed in the able-bodied division against some of the best archers in the world. And won.

He's hoping that he'll get a spot on the US Archery World Cup team. Doubtless.

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Celebration

In-Laws (my wife's parents) just celebrated 60 years of marital bliss. Well, not always - Marge says she never considered divorcing Keith, although she had, on occasion, considered killing him....

So we all went out to a high-end fish house; my wife drove over and picked her parents up, and we all met with my wife's sister, her husband, and their daughter. The service was excellent; the food, unexpectedly, not so much - they seemed to concentrate more on service and presentation rather than actual preparation. But all in all, still a good get-together to recognize so many decades.

Many people get divorced, remarried, divorced again, and that's because they have inappropriate expectations. Nobody's perfect (by the way, my middle name is "Nobody", so I'm kind of the exception). A lot of marriages don't last ten years, let alone sixty.

 

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It's Been Hot

The dog days of summer, indeed!

Transformer

My sister-in-law, the realtor, sent a guy out today to do some landscape upgrading, and he did stuff that quite frankly would never have occurred to me. Clearly, he's been doing this on properties to be sold for quite a while. 100 degree + heat didn't seem to bother him; I saw him taking a break for a few minutes in the shade of one of our park benches, then he was right back at it. Amazing. The place looks like a park, now.

I guess that's "curb appeal" - although we have no curbs or sidewalks up here. But, whatever. Some idiot's sure to buy because Portland. And they're welcome to it.

Used to be a nice town, until the easterners overran the place.

The Runners

This is a well-written and pretty fascinating true story.

However you feel about drugs and illegal aliens, it's well worth a read.