"A possible referendum in Oregon on animal rights would end fishing, hunting, even pest control, just when Democrats are trying really hard not to be seen as 'weirdos again.'"

I'm reading "Protect Every Animal From Cruelty? Not in 2026, Oregon Democrats Say" (NYT).

The measure, known for now as Initiative Petition 28... would give all animals the same protections from cruelty that Oregon grants dogs and cats.... Hunting, trapping and fishing would be outlawed, along with scientific research on animals, lethal pest control and conventional livestock production.... 

The fight is in some ways very Oregon, long a proving ground for ideas that initially seemed politically impossible only to enter the mainstream, such as medical aid in dying, universal vote-by-mail and legalizing the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms for therapy.

When people think of "animals" — as in "I love animals!" — they're not thinking about cockroaches and mosquitoes.

ADDED: According to Ballotopedia, the initiative "Applies to mammals (including vermin), birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish." So I think "lethal pest control" is meant to call to mind mice and rats, not the various troublesome insects. The NYT article says "all animals" and also, more than once, says "pest control." 

In the comments here, Tom T. said, "Then would come the court decisions defining pet ownership as cruelty and outlawing it." That got me looking into the argument that pet-keeping is a form of cruelty to animals. Here's an interesting Vox article from 3 years ago: "The case against pet ownership/Why we should aim for a world with fewer but happier pets." Excerpt: 

"Untethered from reality."

I'm reading "Live Updates: Ninth Circuit Questions Why President Can’t Send National Guard Into Portland/A judge in Chicago is still hearing arguments on the Trump administration’s plans to send troops there. Both cases center on the legal limits of a president’s power to order troops into American cities against the will of state and local authorities" (NYT):

The federal case in Oregon turns, in part, on the amount of deference the courts must give to the president’s decisions about when and where to deploy the National Guard. The federal government is arguing that the courts cannot review those deployment decisions at all. Stacy Chaffin, who is representing Oregon before the appeals court, the Ninth Circuit, told the panel of judges on Thursday that the usual policy of deference did not apply if the president’s assessment of the situation in Portland was “untethered from reality.”

ADDED: It might seem crazy to have a legal test premised on connection to reality, but I think we are that crazy. The "rational basis" test is used all the time. It's important to see that the President is asking for even less scrutiny than that. He's arguing that his decision is unreviewable.

Trump loves bronze. Beautiful bronze. Beautiful everything — storefronts, so beautiful....

At yesterday's rally in Atlanta, Georgia, as he offered to protect us from urban crime and chaos, Trump fell into a reverie about beauty — the beauty of buildings and the tragedy of the desecration of the beauty of the urban landscape:

If Kamala wins it will be crime, chaos, and death all across our country.... They took over Seattle, 20%. If I didn't have the soldiers ready to go that morning... Seattle would still be occupied.... [W]hat they did with Portland... I was in the real estate business. I love storefronts. Beautiful bronze. I love bronze and beautiful everything — storefronts, so beautiful. In Portland... their storefronts have been so decimated they use old 2x4s with a wooden door — no glass no windows.... It's the worst looking avenue I've ever ever seen because, and I spoke to people that have shops there — they don't have many more—  they've all fled — but the few people that remain they have wooden storefronts made out of old lumber, and they said, no, anything we put up, including this, will be knocked down the next time, and it happens on a weekly basis and nobody does anything about it."

Background: "President Donald Trump’s bold plans didn’t change Oregon’s economic trajectory

What has President Trump done for Oregon? Here’s a breakdown on what he did and didn’t deliver" (OPB, October 21, 2020).

"The anxiety that’s been ricing my lungs turns steely and sharp when I see a pale wooden door built into a hillside, framed by lava rock."

"It looks like the entrance to Bilbo Baggins’s house. I go in. A stairway tumbles down to a windowless, 300-square-foot room with textured walls, a bathroom, and a wooden bed that smells like sage. A single low-wattage bulb hums faintly overhead. It’s controlled by a switch covered with a hard plastic guard, which makes it difficult to turn off and on. That’s the point. This room and two others like it in these secret woodlands are the heart of what might be the country’s only established commercial dark retreat. This is a spiritual place, where visitors pay good money to spend long periods of time in crypt-like blackness, devoid of all light and most sounds, in an attempt to uncage their minds and, they hope, discover something deeper within... I flip the switch to see just how dark the dark is, and terror presses into me like 13,000 vertical feet of seawater...."

Writes Tim Neville, in "The Darkness That Blew My Mind/Embarking on four days of total blackout, inside the sensory equivalent of a tomb, our writer went on a dark-cave retreat, the same one that quarterback Aaron Rodgers did" (Outside).

"Perhaps nowhere is more vulnerable than Ocean Shores... the tsunami that could accompany a 9.0 rupture would wash over all of it. People could try driving out..."

"... but officials expect roads to be buckled and sunken, or covered in power lines, trees and debris. The expected subduction would cause the entire area to abruptly sink up to seven feet; the shaking could cause liquefaction of sandy soils before the tsunami reached shore. People could try running to high ground outside of town, but Ocean Shores sits on a six-mile-long peninsula. Those who live toward the southern end would be about eight miles away from high ground. Depending on their location, residents might have only 10 minutes after the shaking stopped before the wave started washing over them.... The best option may be to get on a rooftop or to climb a tree.... Dozens of other waterfront communities are also at risk.... To improve the chances of survival, officials in Washington State have proposed a network of 58 vertical evacuation structures along the outer coast and advised considering dozens of others. They could provide 22,000 people with an option for escape, although thousands of others would remain out of range. Each structure could cost about $3 million. Vertical evacuation structures have been embraced in Japan for years, in the form of platforms, towers and artificial berms..."

From "The Tsunami Could Kill Thousands. Can They Build An Escape? A major quake in the Pacific Northwest, expected sooner or later, will most likely create waves big enough to wipe out entire towns. Evacuation towers may be the only hope, if they ever get built" (NYT).

"But you all know how much I love Oregon, and how much I’ve been seared by the suffering of old friends there. So I’ve reluctantly concluded that I should try not only to expose problems but also see if I can fix them directly."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, quoted in "Nicholas Kristof Leaves New York Times as He Considers a Political Run/Mr. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is weighing a run for governor of Oregon, the state where he grew up" (NYT). 

Kristof "grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Yamhill, Ore." That sounds wonderful.

Heat exhaustion/heat stroke.

 I'm trying to read this WaPo article, "As Portland, Ore., copes with unprecedented heat, illnesses spike and roads buckle":

PORTLAND, Ore. ­— Kim and Kathy Stoughton thought they could wait out the record-breaking heat in their east Portland apartment, even though they don't have air conditioning. 

But by Sunday, they couldn’t take it anymore. 

“I felt fatigued, extremely uncomfortable, mad,” said Kim, who is in his 60s. He was also dizzy and confused, signs of heatstroke...

 Heatstroke?! Come on, haven't we all seen charts like this?

Dizziness is on the heat exhaustion side, not the heat stroke side. And we're told:

So the couple headed to Sunrise Center, a community-center-turned-cooling-station open 24 hours through Tuesday.

That's the appropriate action to take for heat exhaustion. If it were heat stroke, they should have called 911.  This is such basic and important health information. Why can't The Washington Post get that right?! It's so embarrassing. 

That article has been up for more than 6 hours. Fix it!

"Back in the Jeep, struggling to navigate a road once so familiar but now shrouded by smoke-filled darkness, Chris almost ran over..."

"... what looked like a bikini-clad woman on the road. Once he was closer, he realized she was wearing underwear. Her hair was singed, her mouth looked almost black, and her bare feet were severely burned. He impatiently tried to help her into his car, explaining how he needed to find his wife and son, feeling like she was resisting. Finally, she spoke. 'I am your wife.'"

From "The desperate fight to save his family ends in tragedy" (The Oregonian).

"The early miner has never been truly painted. I protest against the flippant style and eccentric heroic of those writers who have made him a terror..."

"... or who, seizing upon a sporadic case of extreme oddity, some drunken, brawling wretch, have given a caricature to the world as a typical miner. The so-called literature that treats of the golden era is too extravagant in this direction. In all my personal experience in mining camps from 1849 to 1854 there was not a case of bloodshed, robbery, theft, or actual violence. I doubt if a more orderly society was ever known. How could it be otherwise? The pioneers were young, ardent, uncorrupted, most of them well educated and from the best families in the East. The early miner was ambitious, energetic and enterprising. No undertaking was too great to daunt him. The pluck and resources exhibited by him in attempting mighty projects with nothing but his courage and his brawny arms to carry them out were phenomenal. His generosity was profuse and his sympathy active, knowing no distinction of race. His sentiment that justice is sacred was never dulled. His services were at command to settle differences peacefully, or with pistol in hand to right a grievous wrong to a stranger. His capacity for self-government never has been surpassed. Of a glorious epoch, he was of a glorious race."

Wrote E. G. Waite, in the May Century Democratic Times, Jacksonville, May 8, 1891, from a collection of letters at "Life and Death on the Althouse." (The Althouse is a creek in Oregon.)

"We should celebrate our mistakes" says one resident of Florence, Oregon...

... quoted in "‘Exploding Whale’ Park Memorializes Blubber Blast 50 Years Later/Residents of a coastal Oregon city voted to name a park for a 1970 explosion that rained chunks of rotting whale flesh on curious bystanders" (NYT).

It's not so much the belief in celebrating mistakes that caused this park to get the name "Exploding Whale Memorial Park." It's that they put up an online survey, and the alternatives were things like “Bridge View Park” and “Siuslaw River View Park.” It's how that British ship (almost) got stuck with the name “Boaty McBoatface” and some town in Estonia ended up with a marijuana leaf on its flag....

I just love #Estonia! The rest of the European Union, especially Sweden, has so much to learn from Estonian civilisation. The commune of #Kanepi just voted to let a #cannabis plant grace its local flag. Hurrah hurrah! https://t.co/HNFYGtFOFn #marijuana #EU

— Alexander Bard (@Bardissimo) March 9, 2018

ADDED:

"Oregon’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, has dispatched state troopers to find missing Republican senators and bring them back to Salem to legislate."

"All 11 Republican senators are in hiding, at least some of them out of state, in order to prevent the Senate from having the quorum it needs to operate. They can’t abide the Democrat-backed carbon cap and spend bill that is up for a Senate vote today."

The Oregonian reports.

Ah! Memories of the Wisconsin protests. Remember "Meet The 14 Wisconsin Democratic FLEEBAGGERS Everyone Is Talking About":

The media latest stars of the Union protests that have been consuming much of the news cycle the past week are the so-called Fleebaggers.

The term "fleebagger" was a play on "teabagger."

These are the 14 Democratic senators from Wisconsin who have fled the state in protest of bills requiring concession from union workers.

By leaving the state, these legislators prevent the Wisconsin senate from reaching the minimum number of members required for voting, known as a quorum.

By fleeing to other Democratic states the assumption is they can't be coerced by police to return. Presumably it's just a matter of time before Bill O'Reilly launches some sort of ambush special aimed at finding them....

They were "stars" when they were Democrats. And a bad old Republican — remember Bill O'Reilly? — had to be hypothetically dragged into the picture to give it a good-and-evil dimension. With the Republicans absconding, in Oregon, the fleebaggers are automatically bad and the Democrats — ready to legislate and deprived of the quorum — are the easy good guys. The narrative clicks into place.

"It’s like with old vinyl, and how everyone wants to have turntables again. We get to a place where something out of date comes back in..."

"... there’s definitely interest in keeping this almost-extinct way of enjoying movies alive."

From "The World’s Last Blockbuster Has No Plans to Close/With the closing of a Blockbuster store in Australia, the one in Bend, Ore., will be the last to survive changes in technology and shopping that reshaped the way people watch movies at home" (NYT).

Bend is in a region that the city’s mayor, Sally Russell, describes as having “huge expanses with really small communities” that often do not have easy access to the high-speed internet necessary for content streaming. Many residents of outlying areas stop at Blockbuster during their weekly trips to town to run errands, drawn in part by the store’s seven-day rental policy, Ms. Russell said, adding that the store’s last-in-the-world status could even give it a lift....

"Bend, Oregon, is becoming a commuter town for Silicon Valley despite the 10-hour drive."

Yes, but it's not a drive when you've got your own plane and you're feeling so distanced from carbon-footprints that you use it to commute.

While most people jump in their cars or walk to public transportation to get to work, Darren Pleasance starts up his plane. Pleasance's family decided to make Bend, Oregon, their permanent home in 2010 even though it meant flying back and forth to the Bay Area for him. When he was tapped by Google to lead its global customer acquisitions team a couple of years later, he explained he would be out of the country most of the time....

How lucky not to be "most people."

"You're not out in Hickville," he said. "The community here is very intellectual."

How awful to be amongst hicks. Those deplorable people. But what's "very intellectual" about Bend?*

If you have to go into the main Silicon Valley, it's a "beautiful drive," said Seven Peaks Ventures general partner Matt Abrams.... "I'm an outdoor person," Abrams said. "If I wasn't in the mountains, I'd be a much angrier person....  Because it's easy to get to Bend, and there are a lot more people coming from the Bay Area and elsewhere, our job is to find out how to diversify the economy and not screw up the environment."

Notice how not screwing up the environment is about what other people do.

_________________________

* Seriously. I'd like to know. I'm always looking for a better place to live. I see Bend has Central Oregon Community College and the OSU-Cascades Campus of Oregon State University. Not that I'm enamored of the intellectualism of higher education. What does "very intellectual" even mean in the context of looking for a place to live a good life? Maybe that the people well-educated? Is it dog-whistle talk for no black people? I see "The racial makeup of the city was 91.3% White, 0.5% African American...."

Oregon leads the way in the protection of minors from sexual abuse: Teachers who think a student may be having sex must report it to the police.

WaPo reports.

According to Oregon law, anyone under 18 years old cannot legally give consent, meaning all sexual activity between minors is considered sexual abuse. This policy, [Salem-Keizer school] district officials say, stems from Oregon’s mandatory reporting and child abuse laws....

The subject came up at a training session for teachers and staff in the school district because “we felt like we hadn’t made it clear enough,” as Superintendent Christy Perry told the Statesman Journal....

Some pointed out that this leaves high school students without anyone to speak with about sex.

“You can’t have a conversation about safe sex without talking about sex,” Deborah Carnaghi, a program coordinator for Child Protective Services in Oregon’s Department of Human Services, told the Statesman Journal. Others pointed out that sexual activity among high school students is common....

Then abuse is common (abuse as defined in the state's criminal law). And why are you instructing students on how to be safe during abuse? Time to get back to abstinence only as the safe-sex training?

Here's a  quote from an 11th-grade girl: “I lose the ability to have a private conversation with a trusted adult who works for the district, about something personal to me. Talking about sexual activity between teachers and students should be confidential.” Ambiguity alert.

The people of Oregon need to think and talk about what kinds of laws they want. They need to notice the hypocrisy and the contradictions. Should teenagers under 18 be having sexual intercourse or not? If the answer is no, no means no, right?

"Portland mayor asks feds to bar free-speech and anti-sharia rallies after stabbings."

That's the hard-to-believe headline at The Washington Post.

Quite aside from the mind-crushingly unAmerican idea of banning free speech about free speech, why is the federal government involved?

The federal government controls permitting for the plaza where both rallies are set to take place. The city of Portland will not issue any of its own permits allowing organizers to hold the events elsewhere, [Mayor Ted] Wheeler said.

The organizer of what is called the “Trump Free Speech Rally,” Joey Gibson, said: “There’s going to be more intensity, there’s going to be more threats. They’re using the deaths of these two people and Jeremy Christian — they’re using it to get Portland all rowdy about our June 4 rally and it’s absolutely disgusting.”

The ACLU — it's still true! — supports free speech:

“It may be tempting to shut down speech we disagree with, but once we allow the government to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we can gather with, history shows us that the most marginalized will be disproportionately censored and punished for unpopular speech. If we allow the government to shut down speech for some, we all will pay the price down the line.” 

WaPo found a Portland State University professor, a "longtime activist" named Tom Hastings to reject the ACLU position: “I know these lines are perceived as pretty fuzzy when we’re dealing with constitutional First Amendment rights. But there’s no long fuse anymore. Everybody’s fuse seems to be quite short.” What?! Things are "fuzzy" and "fuses" are deemed short, and that's enough to throw out the free-speech tradition?!

WaPo tells us that Portland has a problem with "anarchists" getting violent at "peaceful anti-Trump demonstrations."

In April, Portland’s typically family-friendly rose parade was canceled after antifa activists threatened to shut down roads if a Republican group wasn’t barred from the event. And earlier this month, dozens of “black bloc” anarchists destroyed property at May Day protests.

So violence gets its way? What a twisted response to the horrible murders!

"As tensions continue in Portland following the racially charged murder of two men on Friday..."

"... the top Republican in the city said he is considering using militia groups as security for public events."

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” [said Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal]. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”...

The main reason Buchal gave for his attraction to the militia groups was the cancellation of the Avenue of the Roses Parade, an annual Portland community event scheduled for 29 April, after organisers received an anonymously emailed threat of disruption. The anonymous message claimed “Trump supporters and 3% militia” were encouraging people to “bring hateful rhetoric” to East Portland. “Two hundred or more people”, the email said, would “rush into the middle and drag and push those people out”.

When the parade was called off, Buchal issued a statement in which he bemoaned a “criminal conspiracy to commit crimes of riot” and a letter to Mayor Wheeler in which he lamented “rising lawlessness” in Portland....

Wrecking the duckbill.

"A six-second clip posted online shows three men jostling the precarious rock sandstone pedestal, known locally as 'the duckbill,' which it resembles. Someone, apparently a witness, swears at what he sees; the rock tumbles to the ground with a thud; someone else screams, 'Got him!'... After the rock fell, [the video-maker] and his friends confronted the group. The group apparently felt they were doing a public service: A friend had broken a leg on the formation; it was a safety hazard, they said."

Link to NYT.

"Nobody can accept this thing... 'you can't be female and have a penis'... That just makes people's heads explode."

"And that was another reason why I wanted out of this female classification because I have no intention of removing my genitals."

Said Jamie Shupe, the first person in the United States to get the government to officially designate his gender as other than male or female, NPR reports.

Oregon joins several countries in recognizing a third gender. In 2014, India became the largest country in the world to have an official third option, following in the footsteps of Pakistan, Australia and Germany....

A few months ago, Shupe applied to the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles to be listed as non-binary. The agency refused, so they* asked a Multnomah County judge for the new gender designation, and won.

As of now, the state isn't fighting the decision, says DMV spokesman David House. Instead, he says, the agency is looking into how to comply.

"We expect there would be a computer system change required, probably form changes. Also it's very likely that it would require some legislative and administrative rule changes," House says. He expects that in a few months, Oregon driver's license applications will have new gender designations, in addition to male and female.

So all it takes is one county judge to make this decision for a state? No. It's a state-level decision to choose not to appeal. "As of now." So the state goes will forward, spending the money to comply, without submitting the question to the democratic processes of the state... unless, somehow, the people of Oregon raise a fuss about the decision not to appeal, which puts those who want to maintain the status quo in the position of having to draw attention to themselves and risk looking mean/unprogressive.
_____________________

* "They" in that sentence means one person, Jamie Shupe. The construction is confusing, but NPR expects you to maintain your capacity for fluent reading when you encounter that and this one, which slowed me down: "Three years ago, Shupe and their wife of 29 years, Sandy, moved to Portland, Ore."

"People think nothing of spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building a tiny house, but very few people have been inside a tiny house."

Says an owner of a tiny house hotel in Portland. She and her partner, a WaPo travel writer tells us, "seem more at ease as small-living activists and educators than hoteliers, regularly open the tiny houses for tours..."

The owners promote the resort as a learning center and place to “try before you buy”; they also have a dealership for purchasing blueprints or finished houses....

Guests either leave Caravan thinking “No way,” or their visit fortifies their dream. “Some are really here investigating and measuring,” Delman said, “or, they never thought about living in one, but staying here, they realize they can downsize.”

The writer of the article emerges from the experience "feeling wistful, a tiny house fan wanting just a little more."

"But, under a first-in-the-nation policy quietly enacted in January that many parents are only now finding out about, 15-year-olds are now allowed to get a sex-change operation."

"Many residents are stunned to learn they can do it without parental notification — and the state will even pay for it through its Medicaid program, the Oregon Health Plan."

In a statement, Oregon Health Authority spokeswoman Susan Wickstrom explained it this way: "Age of medical consent varies by state. Oregon law — which applies to both Medicaid and non-Medicaid Oregonians — states that the age of medical consent is 15."...

The Oregon Health Authority could not say how many Medicaid recipients have been treated for gender dysphoria since the new policy took effect in January. Oregon has 935,000 people enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan. [The Health Evidence Review Commission] assumes between 14 and 112 of them may be gender dysphoric. It estimates the total cost of adding cross-sex hormone therapy, puberty-suppressing drugs and sex reassignment surgeries to the coverage will be no more than $150,000 per year.

But HERC also believes the state will save money due to fewer suicide attempts....

ADDED: The article has a somewhat hysterical "Fox News" attitude. Reading between the lines, I'm thinking that the health authorities are setting things up to draw in teenagers who need psychological treatment and suicide intervention and who will only in very rare cases break through the filters to sex-reassignment surgery. It's something that's possible and that can, perhaps, break the lure of suicide, but it's unlikely to be the actual treatment a young person will receive from the medical professionals he makes contact with. If I'm wrong about that, I'd like to read about it in a less hysterical presentation of the news.