Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘media’

Thanks go to the blog piglipstick, where I acknowledge lifting items from on a daily basis. (If you haven’t visited piglipstick be sure you do so.)

So, piglipstick alerts us to an item out of Medford, Oregon, courtesy of Information Liberation:

Oregon Officials Consult Precogs, Arrest Man for Bloody Shooting Spree That Killed Four Next Week

Yes, you read that right: “that killled four next week.” How could that happen, you ask? Have we discovered time travel? Not yet, but various law agencies got together and decided a “recently laid-off employee” from the Oregon Dept. of Transportation was “disgruntled” enough to cause suspicion. The man had bought three guns and this, combined with his termination and the “red flags” raised by co-workers, led authorities to arrest the man (on exactly what charges?) and send him off for a psych eval. As one law enforcement spokesperson said:

“Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach.”

As the article comments, maybe this man was indeed ready to do something horrendous, and possibly lives were saved. The obvious shouldn’t have to be stated, but here it goes. As pointed out in the Information Liberation piece:

But there’s a phrase we use to describe the sort of society where the police can come into your home, arrest you, commit you to a mental facility, and confiscate your legally-obtained property on no more than a hunch that you might commit some crime in the near future.

Coast to Coast shares a photo of a large redwood carving of a Bigfoot made for a new bar and grill opening in Kerby, Oregon.

Kerby is in Southern Oregon, Josephine County, near the California border. Population: 400.

The bar owner says the Bigfoot carving needs a name; “maybe listeners can help.” Visit Coast to Coast if you feel creative.

My new Trickter’s Realm column is now up at Tim Binnall’s website. Titled 1947: A Very Good Year, where I look at the grouchy ‘tude some have towards Roswell and related events.

Two odd little things recently in my community concerning the swine flu. The initial hysteria and swine flu as lead news has quited awhile ago, but there is still the constant low hum of the news stream bringing us swine flu news and propaganda.

I was in line at the pharmacy the other day, and while waiting I noticed a small sign in the window about the swine flu vaccine. I’m paraphrasing but it basically looked something like this:

H1N1 Vaccines Here! No waiting! No appointment neccesary!

H1N1 Vaccinations Available For All

see if you are eligble to receive the H1N1 vaccine

Vaccine not available at this pharmacy. Please visit our Elm Street pharmacy for vaccinations.

I wondered why the vaccine is available for all, but you had to check to see if you could take it, and why the sign read that you could get it at my pharmacy, but they were out, you had to actully go a different pharmacy to get vaccinated. I took a picture of the sign with my digital. I checked my menu to make sure the image was there; it was. When I went to show the image to Jim, it was gone. We both looked but it wasn’t in the camera. No, I’m not suggesting alien reptilians were responsible, just a weird little thing. No doubt I hit the delete button or something while putting the camera away.

A few days later, Jim tells me that he saw a man in front of the Public Health Department on 6th waving a large sign. The sign read (paraphrasing again):

Come on in! Get your FREE Swine Flu vaccine here!

As Jim commented, they really want us to get vaccinated.

McMinnville, Oregon’s annual UFO Fest in May has speakers Travis Walton and Colin Andrews among the presenters:

McMINNVILLE, Ore.—Tuesday, March 2, 2010—The buzz is building as we get closer to the 11th Annual UFO Festival on May 14 and 15, 2010, hosted by McMenamins Hotel Oregon (3130 NE Evans St., [503] 472-8427 or [888] 472-8427). The festival, set in a small town in the middle of Oregon wine country, explores and celebrates the possibilities of life beyond Earth. We will welcome keynote speaker and author James Clarkson, a well-known UFO investigator; U.K. crop circle expert Colin Andrews; and UFO witness and abductee Travis Walton, on whom the book and Hollywood film “Fire in the Sky” was based. Passes are $10 per event, $15 for two events or $25 for all three events; UFO passes are available beginning March 15 at ufofest.com.

We’re already booked! See you there…

Strange Planet has a good post about the recent earthquakes, including yesterday’s 8.8 earthquake in Chile. As Strange Planet points out:

 An 8.8 compared to Japan’s 7.0 is not a quake 1.8 times the intensity, as many of you know. It’s exponentially horrific. A 7.1 is ten times the power of a 7.0, a 7.2 is ten times a 7.1, and so on.

When the sea lions left the San Fransico area, I posted that they left for a reason, and I said that they left because of soon to be witnesses earthquakes. Strange Planet also wonders, as I did last night when I heard the news, if the OCR attack on his trainer wasn’t in some ways due to the earthquakes. Giant squid washing up on beaches all up and down the coast, and other unusual marine life behaviors — we’ve been witnessing this recently. A combination of factors, including global warming/climate changes, which the earthquakes are a part of.

As to the orca Tilkumat and the death of his trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld and that tragedy, part of that tragedy is that whales and other creatures (big cats, elephants, etc.) are kept in captivity in the first place. Strange Planet comments:

 Several days ago, there’s the sad incident at Sea World in Orlando, Florida, where a trainer was killed by a 12,000lb. OCR. Reps for the park called it a deadly misstep on the trainer’s part, leaving her ponytail wagging in the water, signaling the animal to seize it as a ‘toy’. Could be. Could also be that he wants out of this bathtub and back into the wild, and that he also sensed something out there. Because if you remember, in the interviews that followed with the staff, they said all of the animals were behaving strangely, were agitated, and just weren’t performing as they know how. There’s something deeper there. [italics mine]

There certainly is “something deeper there.”

The tragic end of Keiko (the orca known as “Free Willy” and kept at the Newport, Oregon aquarium until his release into the ocean) is not something I want to see happen again. I don’t know if releasing Tilikum the orca (I will not use the exploitive and titillating term “killer whale”) back to the ocean is the right thing to do. Maybe it is, I honestly don’t know. A start to prevent these tragedies, and, to simply prevent the imprisonment of sentient beings like orcas in the first place, is to make it illegal to keep these creatures in captivity.

As to the events occurring now, local news (Eugene, Oregon, about 50 miles inland) tells us of tsunami warnings on the Oregon coast because of the earthquakes in Chile and Japan. According to the KEZI news website:

The National Weather Service has issued a tsunami advisory for the Oregon coastal area.  Coastal residents are advised to stay out of the water, off the beach, and away from harbors and marinas.

This is not a watch or warning. No significant coastal flooding is expected to  be produced by this wave.  However, some areas of the coast could experience dangerous currents and surges in harbors and bays due to this tsunami. [a href=”http://kezi.com/news/local/164262”> Massive Quake Prompts Tsunami Advisory For Oregon Coast

I heard about the earthquake in Chile from Ian Punnett on C2C. He said there weren’t any details but that the news was, an 8.5 (at the time, that’s what was reported; today’s paper said it was 8.8) earthquake in Chile. So I turned on the TV, with our roughly 250 channels, and I couldn’t find one news program. 11:30ish pm, and not one news program. I mean news, like the old CNN, where you had simple, straight forward information coming in about what was going on in the world. What I found were “news” shows having to do with entertainment, news shows, of a sort, with a host or two but clearly the show was about them, and what they wanted to focus on, which seemed mostly to be the tragedy at SeaWorld. The most news I got was from the Weather Channel.

In an odd bit of juxtapositioning, the following item was in today’s local news about Oregon’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport: State OKs money for Oregon marine mammal center:

Assuming Gov. Ted Kulongoski signs the bill, researchers at Hatfield hope that amount will be enough to win $16 million in federal funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also called NIST. Combined, that would be $25 million, enough to build the new center.

“This would establish a unique center, a university-based center for the study of marine mammals,” said Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute. “It would be the largest in the U.S.

“It will give us the unique capacity to advance technology for the study of and protection of marine mammals, including satellite tagging, advanced studies of life history and analyses of genetics diversity.”

As with the people of Haiti, my prayers and thoughts go to those in Chile as well.

Thanks to Iona Miller for the link.

From Walterville, Oregon, the following item:
CIA Requests Its Own Documents From Author. Oregon writer H.P. Albarelli Jr.’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, has the CIA interested. The book is about the CIA’s use of:

drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help…

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.

Residents in John Day in Eastern Oregon are fighting Aryan Nation scum who want to buy and settle in the area: Rural Ore. rises against Aryan Nations A man, Forteanly named Paul R. Mullet, says he’s the leader of the movement, which is in dispute with other PNW self-described neo-nazi Aryan Nation whatevers. But Mullet is having a hard time because no real estate agency will do business with him, according to the news item.

In my previous post about Oregon columnist Bob Welch’s piece on praising The Lord before partaking of bison, wild cow, nutria, lemon peppered cougar and bear, I mentioned that Welch had written a column about Bigfoot. The column is reprinted on the Bigfoot Encounters website, with comments about Welch’s column. Here it is, from March of 2002:Bob Welch: Tall, tall tales equal Bigfoot The column, inspired by Welchs reading Bigfoot at 50: Evaluating a Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence. in theSkeptical Inquirer. Welch basically follows the uber skeptic mindset concerning Bigfoot and basically parroting their stand on Bigfoot. Commenting that one almost wants to be a “dreamer” and believe in Bigfoot, it just can’t be:

But you can’t.

Why not? Because the idea is so bizarre? Nope. Bizarreness shouldn’t preclude belief in something. People believe in all sorts of bizarre concepts, from God to gravity to Oregon’s home football uniforms.

No, the real reason you can’t believe is because most of the “water-tight” evidence leaks like your 25-year-old gutters. To wit:

And then he lists the skeptic response of, basically “no evidence” and quotes skeptic Benjamin Radford.

Bob Welch is a columnist for the Register-Guard, Eugene-Springfield area’s local newspaper. It’s a mainstream column; Welch likes sports a whole lot, and writes about so-called human interest type stories in the area. He isn’t out there at all, (I remember a column he wrote some years ago where he made insipid fun of Bigfoot witnesses, yuck yuck) so it’s that kind of thing.

He had an little moment of synchronicty the other day which inspired him to ask readers to share their interesting odd moments involving synchronicty.(Mysterious, magical or just weird? ) In his recent column Mysterious, eerie events remembered
he shares some of those responses. My favorites: the story about feral cats in Hawaii, and the coach in Harrisburg who had a ghostly encounter with his mother.

Not to pick on Welch (though I’m not a fan particularly) but in another column, as well as a very different kind of column, he writes about a wild game feast in Potluck’s food is, well, a little wild At no point during the article does he address the ethical issues; it’s simply a golly gee kind of piece about, in a surreal juxtaposition, a local country church’s annual game meat fest:

The setting is beautiful, quintessential Americana, a white church steeple rising into the sky amid trees, fields and rolling hills about five miles northwest of Monroe.

The dress is primarily, well, camouflage.

And the décor is what I’d call country fish & game: guns, pelts, poles, antlers, traps, duck decoys and two giant elk mounts, including emcee Scott Ballard’s world-record “8 by 9” Roosevelt elk — eight points on one side of the rack, nine on the other.

After the prayer, we head through the kitchen to go through the potluck line.

The whole scene is bizarre; prayer, camouflage, dead animals on the walls as well as on plates, and the contrast between the country and the gun toting hunters.

Among the food offered: bear, bison, wild cow soup, Nutria, elk, and lemon pepper cougar. And among the door prizes for the event: waterproof Bibles.