#2 2008-07-13 15:47:52
Love the Memorial Hospital ad - "We pride ourselves on the limited wait at our emergency room"
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#3 2008-07-13 15:56:48
What, no video? Disappointing.
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#4 2008-07-13 16:23:24
Twenty years or so ago, the "Rainbow Family" and their "Gathering of the Tribes" had a nasty reputation for descending like locusts on an area of natural beauty and leaving devastation in their wake. I've never heard whether they've cleaned up their act in the years since.
There's probably truth in both sides of the story...but I do have a difficult time imagining the Forestry Service as a gang of child-threatening thugs.
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#5 2008-07-13 16:27:56
George Orr wrote:
Twenty years or so ago, the "Rainbow Family" and their "Gathering of the Tribes" had a nasty reputation for descending like locusts on an area of natural beauty and leaving devastation in their wake. I've never heard whether they've cleaned up their act in the years since.
There's probably truth in both sides of the story...but I do have a difficult time imagining the Forestry Service as a gang of child-threatening thugs.
I met someone from the FBI who worked regularly with the Forestry Service once. She had a lot of stories about the crap they go through with people trying to stop logging. One guy apparently handcuffed himself to a sofa that he embedded in concrete in the middle of the road. They brought out a blowtorch to get the handcuffs off and he miraculously could pull his hands free after all. It's been a long time so I don't remember most of the stories, but yeah, I doubt it was just the Forestry Service run amok, although once something like that reaches critical mass it's kind of self-sustaining.
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#6 2008-07-13 18:46:00
The Forest Service's policies on public interaction during enforcement has changed in the last few years. I had contracts to spend some of the gadzook amounts of the money the CA forestry and wildlife officials recieved for the war on terror and drugs. They were retasked, retrained and reequipped for the new mission.
I can only imagine the way the new stormtrooper tactics adopted by the forest service and every other govt agency contributed to the escalation of situation. Even in the Reagan/Bush years they maintained a nonconfrontational approach within the campgrounds. You would never see a forest service ranger with a weapon and none was ever needed in their oversight. Even the DEA practiced a selective and non escalating policy when extracting some drug war fugitive from the festival.
The Rainbows and weekend hippies may present some real social challenges. the misfit factor is high in all its wonderful terrible weirdness. The gathering's volunteer organizers have practiced significant remediation afterward on the campground. I do not know what their reputation is in the 2000s, but for 2 decades previous they have received passing and often complimentary assessments from the Forest service on how they left the sites. There is no doubt that the presence of so many people has an impact. These are remote but not wilderness designated sites. The charter for these public lands is multi use. All the sites they choose already allow open camping. Although in the 1980s the forest service changed the letter of their rules to restrict group size with a permitt process in an attempt to prevent larger asemblies.
If millions of acres can be leased at discount and subsidized for resource extraction or turned over to development for pay to recreate, why can't a few thousand hippies camp for a week on 100 acres. So far the Rainbow family has been able to resist any challenges to shut them out.
And I hope they always will.
I spoke to forest service officials about this in the early 1990s ( my Mom's boyfriend was one) and while they expressed real concerns about management issues associated with so many primitive site campers at once, in the end they never had any significant problems. The main issues have come to be social objection. The non commercial self organizing aspect of the rainbow gathering is now such an aberration in our society. But should it be?
There is no one for officials to assign liability. To good effect or not, the attendees assume personal responsibility for their actions. The gathering's self appointed organizers see no need for the type of authoritarian management which have become the norm in our society for any assemblage of the public for an event. They wish to handle it themselves and for whatever missteps they make in the end they manage well enough in what might seem like anarchy to an outsider. Over the years there was significant cooperation with the Forest Service to address real issues of land, health and crowd management. I wonder if that is breaking down now.
Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2008-07-13 19:34:07)
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#7 2008-07-13 18:53:29
Oh, come on, JR, give me a fucking break. You want to talk about storm trooper tactics and shiny happy Rainbow People? Do you really think that rubber bullets are carried around all the time just for the heck of it by the Forestry Service? There's more to this story than we're getting.
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#8 2008-07-13 19:15:57
There sure is Tojo. Maybe the rainbows have a new generation of rowdy anachists. But with the scene I was familliar with a decade ago such threats of violence to enforcement officials were not tolerated within the gathering's social order. The common tactic was not to threaten to bash a uniformed and armed state trooper's skull in, but to mindfuck him by having muddy naked hippie chicks dance around him within the campground.
The forest service never carried weapons and did not seek to hand out citations or harrass people for smoking pot within the campground. Confining their enforcement of infractions to the access roads. Unless you wanted to intimidate people there would have been no reason to bring crowd control weapons.
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#9 2008-07-13 19:25:57
Johnny_Rotten wrote:
There sure is Tojo. Maybe the rainbows have a new generation of rowdy anachists. But with the scene I was familliar with a decade ago such threats of violence to enforcement officials were not tolerated within the gathering's social order. The common tactic was not to threaten to bash a uniformed and armed state trooper's skull in, but to mindfuck him by having muddy naked hippie chicks dance around him within the campground.
The forest service never carried weapons and did not seek to hand out citations or harrass people for smoking pot within the campground. Confining their enforcement of infractions to the access roads. Unless you wanted to intimidate people there would have been no reason to bring crowd control weapons.
I think these kinds of conflicts may have been more common than you were led to believe. Well, maybe not to this extent, but the fact that there was a branch of the FBI dedicated to protecting and enforcing laws in conjunction with the Forestry Service in the 90's would seem to indicate that not everything is always so peaceful, although it's entirely possible that none of these incidents had to do with the Rainbow Family specifically.
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#10 2008-07-13 20:11:25
None of the incidents you are describing have anything to do with the Rainbow gathering. They are not an activist or support group for such causes.
The FBI was tasked to deal with the monkeywrenchers, ELF vandalism and the general classification of such incidents as a form of terrorism even before 9/11. But even before the ELF incidents in the 1990s many of the original monkeywrenchers had foresworn such tactics like tree spiking and equipment sabatoge as counterproductive.
The success of the redwood summer civil disobedience protests may have led to political pressure within the FBI to paint much of enviormental activism as domestic terrorism. There is a big difference between a few extremists torching a mid ski mountain warming lodge, some cars in a dealer's lot and organized protestors stopping the wheels of industry for a day by chaining themselves in the road.
Ask yourself what in the world is the FBI doing getting involved with the intricacies of cutting handcuffs off some kid? That's misdomeanor civil disobedience stuff.
Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2008-07-13 20:27:32)
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#11 2008-07-13 20:26:12
Johnny you hippie, somebody give him a hug and a flower
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#12 2008-07-13 21:30:16
I'm trying to remember this great book I read about being in the forest service-how it basically sucks, you're underpaid and driving around the forest by yourself, coming in contact with drug runners and growers, psycho homeless squatters, serial killers and drunk campers and all you have is your radio, which doesn't work, old, outdated equipment and a shotgun. Sounded scary.
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#13 2008-07-13 21:37:10
icangetyouatoe wrote:
I'm trying to remember this great book I read about being in the forest service-how it basically sucks, you're underpaid and driving around the forest by yourself, coming in contact with drug runners and growers, psycho homeless squatters, serial killers and drunk campers and all you have is your radio, which doesn't work, old, outdated equipment and a shotgun. Sounded scary.
In the novel "Up the Down Staircase," the hapless teachers of Calvin Coolidge High School were frequently told, after asking for additional materials, moneys, or resources in order to better do their job, "Let it be a challenge to you."
How's that for can-do spirit?
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#14 2008-07-13 21:44:08
I LOVE that book, Taint.
And found the one I was talking about-it is a quick read, kind of interesting-
Nature Noir by Jordan Smith
http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0618224165
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