"All The News You Never Knew You Needed To Know ...Until Now." August 13 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: We Can Call It 'The Last Chance Fire' Despite It's Official Name - Musings On My Teenage Years And Fire Crew 'Impressment'Prefer An MP3 Playlist? It's Here: [192kbps VBR 20:59 Minutes] Other Audio Formats Available [ Here ] Twitter This Commentary |
There's heavy resistance to the "taking and control" (call it occupying if you'd like...) by 400 Marines/100 Afghan soldiers of a major town in the Helmand province of Afghanistan...However, it MAY make no long term difference at all.
Here's what defeat in Afghanistan looks like: Casualty-phobic troops, walls, sand bags, and blast barriers:
Having spent this past July at International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul, I have seen what defeat looks like. It takes the form of thousands of casualty-phobic troops ensconced behind the walls, sand bags, and blast barriers of a well-protected safety bubble.
When ISAF troops venture out from their base into the "red zone" (i.e. the comparatively safe streets of Kabul) they are prepared for combat. Barreling through the crowded streets of a city that has been called a comparative "safety zone" by those fighting in the south, they jam the phone signals of average Afghans with their ECMs (electronic counter measures) and jam the roads with their convoys. One would think that the coalition vehicles driving around Kabul in combat posture and menacingly waving 50 caliber machine guns at Afghans were storming a Taliban sangar (trench) in Helmand, not competing with rush hour traffic.
For the vast majority of troops at ISAF headquarters, Afghanistan remains an enigma, a threatening land lying beyond the concertina wire of the base. The only Afghan most ever meet is the Hazara carpet seller on base who serves authentic Afghan food once a month. And the only coalition soldiers most Afghans meet are encased in armor-plated vehicles or flak jackets.
[In Full @ Foreign Policy (by an ISAF vet]
When those vets get home, things don't go so well for them either, see the first of three-part series by Penny Coleman, who's written extensively on the tribulations of US veterans of war, about the criminalization and institutionalization of American Veterans
Time is running out on Gitmo - The DOJ and the Pentagon have gone to Michigan's Standish Prison and Ft Leavenworth Kansas (local news reports) to investigate the incarceration of the Guantanamo POWs in those facilities
Iran is asking the IAEA for a resolution banning attacks on nuclear facilities anywhere in the world
Harvey Milk, the Gay San Francisco supervisor assassinated by another board member, and 15 others, were awarded the Medal of Freedom by the White House yesterday.
What WERE all those sirens last night throughout Santa Cruz? Call out the volunteers! Last Chance Road, just up the coast from the Da Buffalo's home pasture at Davenport California is burning... Currently one of the largest fires in the US.
In the 60s and early 70s, Last Chance Road was the local hippie communal land with Yurts, Tipis and various forms of alt-housing 4 miles up an unimproved, rutted dirt road. It's different now...
MUCH different, as the weekend hippies became Yuppies and DINKS (Double Income, No Kids), bought the land bordering Big Basin state park, where the sheriffs used to continually threaten raids thru the back gate to Last Chance, and now the road all the way up to the mill site, the communal center of the community, is paved... suitable for 'Bimmers' and those not-really-offroad-capable SUVs.
(The image above is the 'Mill Site" circa 1970). The 'Woods Hippies' who lived there in those days had a LOT more smarts than these urbanized, commuting, latter day 'hipsters'... They DID NOT bring expensive possessions and build exorbitant housing in this fire-indefensible area... The last wilderness area of Santa Cruz county. Now, the taxpayers will end up paying for the follies of the nuevo-wealthy who, as Travus (gracefully) DID NOT POINT OUT, are often 'too busy' to even clear a firebreak around their homes no less "get their hands dirty" with hard physical labor.
After the commentary (and after the Black Irish Band's "Smokey The Bear") from Da Buffalo's personal collection, Cat Mother and The All Night Newsboys, refugees in the early 70s fleeing the East coast (Boston/New York) to relative sanity in the local woods, and beyond, "The Paranoid Papers: Outdoor Man/This Land/Roll Wheels Roll", from their 1971 album, Last Chance Dance.
Their first album was re-released in the early 90s for it's historic value. They were Jimi Hendrix 'crash test dummies' when he first built Electric Lady Studios, and it was the only album produced by Jimi, who no doubt met them when they played benefits at "Alternate U", a radical free school in New York. Jimi was a "Yippie!" folks... If you have the vinyl of Electric Ladyland, look inside the gatefold cover and in one of the pictures, on his hat, a Yippie button... prominently displayed.
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Recorded & transcribed by Da' Buffalo Amongst Wolves
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