My Own Side

On December 3rd, 2007 a heavy rainstorm struck the Pacific Northwest. The coastal areas were hit hard with high winds, but many inland areas also had severe flooding problems from the swollen rivers. Surprisingly, my hometown of Woodinville was one that had flooded downtown streets.

Now, we’ve had rain before. A lot of rain. This is the Pacific Northwest. But our streets have never flooded like that. KOMO TV had a helicopter overhead, and they have dramatic footage of the water pouring across a parking lot and into an intersection, flooding several blocks of area businesses. Even after seeing the footage of the path of the water, I was still puzzled as to where it was coming from, so the day after I drove downtown to find the source and solve the mystery. I never suspected it would involve a salmon.

It turns out that behind the parking lot is a stream. Back in September, a windstorm blew down a tree across it. One of the tenants in the building repeatedly called the city to come out and deal with the tree. Eventually, he cut off some branches from it so that he could reach the creek and let his dog have some water. When the city employee finally came out, he chewed out the tenant for touching the tree!

“That’s our job!”

“Well, you weren’t doing it!”

“You can’t disturb this stream, it has salmon!”

Out came part of the tree, but they left the base of it there on the bank, all nice and natural. The tenant called the city back and said that they should take it all, that it wasn’t attached to anything and would float if the water rose. They never came back. Fast forward to December, and guess what. Wood floats. Right into a culvert where it became clogged with debris and flooded the town.

A tenant of a neighboring building saw the tree and debris blocking the culvert and called the city to come out and clear it from the stream. At this point, the stream was overflowing and flooding the parking lot. The answer he got?

“We can’t disturb the stream, it has salmon.”

By the time the city bureaucrat had gotten whatever waiver from the fish kissers they felt they needed it was too late, and the little backhoe they sent over couldn’t pull the jammed tree out. Here you can see the stream, culvert and tree (but not the salmon). Note the tear marks on the tree (lower right) from where the backhoe tried to grab it.

Thanks to this attitude, scores of businesses were damaged. At least two tenants I spoke to will probably have to move to survive, and scores of people had their homes and possessions wrecked. But the salmon are happy. At least I assume they are. They’ve been gone for months now from this stream.

This is the interior of the building next to the stream. I entered through an Army recruiting office (moonbats rejoice).

Here are some pictures of the flooding at the Waterford apartments a few blocks down the street. Note the water lines. Remember that this is what it still looked like the day after the flooding. Some people had to be evacuated by boat. The local fire department took two hours to find an inflatable raft to use. I know what’s going to be on their Christmas list.

If there was any justice in the world, this would be the welcome mat of a certain city bureaucrat.

Final score, Salmon 1, People 0. In light of this fiasco, I decided to go out this week to dinner. Izumi’s Restaurant has excellent salmon teriyaki. I’m going to do my part to even the score a little.

More pictures are here.

The anti-western environmental marxists can’t seem to get off the same old tired theme. The evil west (especially those greedy biotech firms) are pillaging the poor repressed indiginous peoples of formerly colonized lands. At least they came up with a new term to keep us entertained, ‘biopiracy’. From a story in the U.K. Guardian newspaper:

The new piracy: how West ’steals’ Africa’s plants

Swiss and British firms are accused of using the scientific properties of plants from the developing world to make huge profits while giving nothing to the people there. Antony Barnett reports

Shocking! Evil corporate profiteers are importing huge harvesters to trudge across the third world landscape, leaving trails of destruction in their wake as they rape the pristine green landscape of valuable botanicals. The locals watch in horror as their beautiful land is turned into a barren dustbowl!

Well, not exactly. Apparently the former president of the Alpine Garden Society visited Tanzania back in 1976 and took a handful of seeds of a local wildflower back to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. They’ve been happily growing away in the evil west since then, until some brilliant western scientists (who happen to work for a large biotech firm) discovered they they could be crossed with another plant to produce an excellent hybrid for hanging baskets. Other brilliant (western) people with expertise in marketing convinced others to take a risk by investing their money in advertising the result, which seems to have turned out well for them in this case. The article glosses over all of the expensive failures and dead-ends that the firm has had to eat in between successes.

Now the marxists are calling foul, saying that the profits should be shared with the Tanzanians, who have plenty of the plants still on their hills, had no idea the plants were worth anything, never dreamed of crossing them with another plant, wouldn’t know how to begin doing this even if they did dream it, certainly could not have gotten anyone to bankroll the experiment, and didn’t invent the stupid plant in the first place.

Piracy implies theft. And theft generally implies something tangible, like gold, cash or your car. Even in intellectual property theft, such as software or an invention, the victim has to have done work to create something first before it can be stolen. How is biopiracy theft? And who was it ’stolen’ from, exactly?

The eco-nuts simply despise capitalism, western civilization and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives progress. They have the bizarre self-loathing that defines so many on the left.

From the article, here are a few other examples of what they are calling ‘colonial pillaging’.

· A diabetes drug being developed by a British firm that comes from the Libyan plant Artemisia judaica.

· An immuno-suppressant drug being developed by GlaxoSmithKline that comes from a compound found in a termite hill in Gambia.

· A treatment for HIV taken from mycobacteria discovered in mud samples from the Lango district of central Uganda.

· Infection-fighting drugs made from amoebas in Mauritius and Venezuela.

· An anti-diarrhoea vaccine developed from Egyptian microbes.

· A slug barrier made from a Somalian species of myrrh.

All of humanity needs these inventions, and more like them. Calling their discovery ‘piracy’ is insulting.