Walter Brasch writing at Pacific Views looks at The Politics of Humanitarian Aid beginning with the complaints about the way the junta in Burma reacted to the recent cyclone and then does an in depth review of all of the missteps made by the Hedgemony in the response to Katrina.
The Hedgemony has left the US in a moral pit, rather than the high ground.
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Bush and Cheney along with the GOP have paid some political price for their astronomically bad performance in the wake of Katrina but nowhere near what is justified. In a sane world they would have both been impeached for dereliction of duty and more than likely been imprisoned to boot. One can only hope that the wheel of karma will play out the proper justice at some point.
And then, there are things like this:
Nearby Firing Ranges Complicate Soldiers’ Recovery From Stress
This just made my jaw drop!!
%#@*#&^$ hell!!! What is WRONG with these %#$@#& retarded morons there? Seriously? How the #$%@ can anyone with one micron of understanding and compassion say that and allow this to happen? And WHAT is it with these insane Bushloving women who seem to be everywhere?? Almost every time I read some BS like that, it’s some retarded woman that said it! Doesn’t anyone there know how to think for themselves anymore?! And this moron Kelly is supposed to be a “behavioral health supervisor”!! For what? Lab rat’s?? She should be taken out to one of the ranges and staked to a post for a week while all the boys have fun with shooting practice all around her! Maybe she’d have some appreciation of what these poor bastards have been through! Sadly though, with the weapon skills and accuracy the US grunts have, she’d probably cop a bullet within 5 min’s and wouldn’t get the full benefit of the experience she is so blaze about!!
You know Bryan… as much as I like you and some other Americans… if someone offered to give me a million$ and pay all expenses for me to go to the USA, I wouldn’t take it! The temptation to kill the first a*hole I met would be way too strong, and it would be a done deal before I could even think about it!! JHC!
Oh!! And I left out this gem!
‘It’s something we haven’t considered’ What is wrong with THAT picture??! The lunatics are TRULY running the asylum!
I haven’t prayed for a long time! But I think I’ll start fervently now!
Fallenmonk, they elected a Republican governor in Louisiana, so the price hasn’t been very high. You would get life in prison for dealing in drugs that don’t distort reality half as much as what Republican true believers are taking. The Dems don’t know how to tie the Hedgemony to the Republican Party. Every time they try the connection breaks.
The reason I finally went with Edwards is because he and his wife actually fought and got in peoples’ faces about this crap. The DNC refuses to go on the offensive, and you can’t win if you don’t try.
Actually, Kryten, these quarters are far superior to the WWII era ruins that they housed wounded in earlier in the war. They at least have running water, windows and doors, and electricity.
Rumsfeld included several major military hospitals, including Walter Reed, in his recommendations for facilities to be closed, as he was supposedly planning for two invasions. He and his inner circle vastly underestimated the casualty figures and used those minimal figures for planning. The reason these barracks are available for casualties is because the regular units had been moved out due to the noise.
There is no spare hospital space in this country, there is no spare space of any kind in the US health care infrastructure. Cost-cutting has eliminated all of the slack and we are losing emergency rooms and trauma centers every year because they are too expensive.
We can’t take care of the normal health care in the US, so we certainly can’t take care of the returning casualties. The Army is trying to “off load” as many people as possible to the Veterans Administration system, which is already overwhelmed and underfunded.
If we had held back one or two of the military bases that have been closed over the years, and “mothballed it” rather than dumping it, we could have reopened it as a center for military casualties at minimum cost to the taxpayer. A base is a city in miniature, with all of the resources of a city, and it would have been a central location for all of the care.
There is no planning, no vision in the US government. When a base is scheduled for closure, they don’t shut it down, they let it fall apart.
Welcome to my world, Kryten. I live here and have to avoid killing people every day. I can see the problems and the solutions, and can’t get anyone to listen.
Hey Bryan… Don’t worry m8… I really do (and always have) understood exactly how you feel. It transcends nationality, borders, ethnicity, sex, etc. It’s what any honorable, intelligent, caring human should and would feel.
Anyway, apologies if I offended anyone for my rant. I’ve not had a great week. I finally got some paying work, and got a lousy head cold that I’m just getting over. Bah… you know how it is! 😉
Mind you… the rant did feel good! 😉 LOL
BTW, these a*holes today do NOT have anywhere near the excuse they had after WW2 for piss poor treatment of these soldiers! And at least after WW2 when they understood the problems, they did try to do something about them. These bastards are just blaming these soldiers for causing them problems for not doing the decent thing and just getting themselves killed, or killing every raghead in Iraq! They don’t want to know about physically or mentally wounded, they want black or white… dead, or alive. Ambiguity and fluid states really upsets them, they lack the moral and intelligence capacity to cope with it. These people like the two morons above live in a fact free and unrealistic fantasy land they created.
I don’t know the answers m8, but I am happy to know that there are still people like you around. It does help my sanity.
Thanks.
On the World War II housing I didn’t make myself clear – they put returning Iraq War casualties in decrepit WWII barracks because there were no other facilities available. After World War II the facilities were fine, because they were newly built for training, but they hadn’t been used since the end of the Vietnam War and had just been allowed to deteriorate.
The buildings would have been adequate if they had been shut down and closed up after drying out. There are a lot of people down here who do it with cabins that they may not visit more than once a year. If you shut them down and drain the plumbing, they will be usable with a minimum of maintenance, but if you just lock the door and leave they are apt to be soggy saw dust after the mold, mildew, and termites get finished.
All you need is to watch the roof, have good venting, and no water in the pipes to crack during a cold spell.
Those videos my the irate father a few weeks ago are the result of a few months of leaving a building empty without flushing the sewer side and draining the supply side. It only takes an hour or so, and you can flush the sewer side by simply going around and flushing.
These people are penny-wise and pound-foolish. They don’t want to “waste money” on the preventive maintenance that would have saved them a week of work and bad publicity.
The reason I finally went with Edwards is because he and his wife actually fought and got in peoples’ faces about this crap.
i didn’t especially like edwards for along time, and was underwhelmed by what i knew of his senate record, and a bit turned off by his wealth and the big estate that he built on what had previously been a nicely forested hillside… but taking on and defeating the [so-called] health insurance industry is one of my biggest priorities. what better candidate can you ask for than someone who has made millions and millons of dollars doing just that?
Truth be told, I wasn’t impressed with Edward’s endorsement because Elizabeth didn’t join him. If she had seconded John’s endorsement I might have considered this a good thing and a sign that something might happen. But she didn’t join him, and I know that she does not like Clinton, so I figure it was the “Old Guard” meddling, just like they did with the Carter endorsement.
It sounds like the backroom boys are beating the “unity drum”. I wish them luck, because I don’t see it happening.
Bryan: Ahh, I see what you meant. Right. 🙂 That actually makes it all worse you know. *sigh*
I think I can be honest enough to admit that if I hadn’t spent a year in Cambodia (and then other places) and been through what these soldiers have been through, I probably wouldn’t be so angry about it, and I really am angry! It’s just… wrong, in every way. When I was thinking about it after first reading the article, the kinds of thoughts I had were things like “I wonder what contacts I have that can get me into the USA and get me a trusty old Steyr AMR so I can go teach a few lessons!” Ahem. (I like the very accurate and extremely deadly IWS 2000 personally, it fired a 15.2mm APFSDS (Armour piercing, fin stabilised, discarding sabot) tungsten (or DU) munition at a muzzle velocity of mach 4.5, errr… unofficially, of course!) 😉 I could take out a moving APC at 1 mile, so an armored car or body armor would be no problem. LOL Ehhh… it’ll never happen, still… I can console myself with the image. And no… I am not thinking about anything like that at all seriously (not to mention the *practical* problems that it would present)! Just in case you are wondering! 😀 I’m sure you have entertained similar thoughts at times of the past several years.
Hipparchia: curiously, I felt similarly towards Edwards. But when he threw his hat in the ring, I really thought he would be the lesser of all evils. I guess I was right seeing what his party did to ensure he had no chance.
BTW, I haven’t forgotten the recipes! I just haven’t had a chance to dig out my archives yet, sorry. I’m hoping to get a chance this weekend. I do have a lot here, but they are not friendly to your dietary requirements. 😉
Cheers!
I do know what you mean, as my Mother can attest. I have often stated the opinion that it is a good thing for a number of people that I no longer have the power to call in an air strike. A flight of F-4s dropping napalm can spoil the whole day.
Meditation, a lot of meditation. It’s not a cure but it softens the edges.
Yeah… I hear that! 😀 Meditation… I used to meditate with a bottle of the best vodka or scotch (I used to go through a bottle of Chivas Royal Salute in a couple weeks, and 2 or 3 bottles of the best Stoly, with an occasional Bollinger AR or VVF at over $300 a pop I still have the boxes they cam in, as a reminder of historical stupidity. Which explains why I have no money now. Well, that and a few hundred $k in medical expenses over the years. Meditation would have been MUCH cheaper, but possibly less fun! 😉
No… There is no answer in a bottle, or drugs. The demons just get worse and laugh louder.
These days, I console myself with the occasional win for someone, or good deed for a friend or some worthy individual. It doesn’t make me any money, but it makes my life bearable. 🙂
But it is so hard. Even after 30 years… I was trained thoroughly to do hard things, to take life, and I can’t forget it, or walk away from it. I learned well. And it’s so hard to stay in control. I let my health and physical fitness go downhill in the hope it would make it easier. As I discovered some years ago, my body may not be as tough, hard or fast as it once was, but it is still deadly. (No, I didn’t kill anyone, by some miracle, I managed to stop that from happening in time). I discovered, to my horror, that letting myself go made it worse! I no longer had the skill and control I did and my body was on auto-pilot most of the time. It was easy to understand all the stories of returned vet’s that killed someone without meaning to, without even knowing they were doing it sometimes. What happens with all these ruined soldiers returning from Iraq & Afghanistan? I hate to think of it.
I became a recluse really. I stopped trusting myself. Nobody told me about this. Nobody warned me that after 2+ years of intensive training, I would be like this for the rest of my life! Two of my team mates committed suicide after we returned. One almost killed his sister. They couldn’t cope with *peace*.
What happens to us?
I never did get an answer. I just try to stay in control, and hope.
du? ducks unlimited? democratic underground? 😉 i quite sympathize with your desire to do a little cleaning up here, kryten, but being a dedicated treehugger myself, i wouldn’t mind if you refrained from littering the place with nookyoolar waste.
recipes, no worries. share if you like, i’m pretty adventurous about food, either making it or eating it, and like to try new things, but you’re not under any obligation to feed me. 😀
meditation, i did that for several years, not because i felt like i needed it, but just because i could [originally i had taken up yoga to improve my strength and flexibility for various sports]. i’ve had some awfully realistic out-of-body experiences doing that stuff. kinda cool, actually. i’m still not convinced there’s an afterlife, or a spirit world, or whatever, but i can sure see why people believe there is.
edwards… i’ve proposed, on more than one occasion and only half-jokingly, an edwards/kucinich or kucinich/edwards ticket, as in elizabeth and elizabeth. but both john centrist, but not horribly so] and dennis [nicely lftist] have taken on the corporatocracy before, and won. not surprising that the ptb won’t let either of them get too close to the presidency.
The big thing about meditation is that it help to put the “human” part of the brain in control. Anger is about the earlier parts of the brain, and you have to bring that part back under control of the actual thinking segments, rather than the reacting segments.
If the control is good enough, you can control even the most primitive portions, those designed to be autonomous. Lots of concentration required and very difficult to master, but you can help your physical being by shutting off the overloads produced by the lower brain.
Hipparchia: LOL Don’t worry! We (Aussies) have always been more *envoronmentally friendly* than our US *cousins*! 😉 We use tungsten, US uses DU! LOL We don’t use agent orange etc to defoliate and kill entire forests either! Funny that…
No one could have imagined that using depleted uranium would cause problems…
yabbut, they weren’t our forests! 🙄
lessee… you wouldn’t be able to bring your own tungsten with you, or ship it ahead of time, and if you came here emptyhanded and borrowed from us….
eh, better to skip it. go to king island instead, sit on the beach and eat seafood and meditate to the sound of the surf. tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it!
what we have here is a failure to imaginate.
LOL Lot’s of tungsten in disused lightbulbs etc.;) But hey… It’s only the USA… so what the heck… I’ll use what I could get, DU would do in a pinch! LOL Part (a big part) of my training was improvisation. 🙂 I can easily make a plastic explosive with materials available in many households. Put some in a metal water pipe with ball bearings and/or nails, cap the ends… one very nasty AP bomb! Kinda like what the Iraqi’s are using. 🙂
However… there is no way I or anyone (out side of the manufacturer with the right factory) can make these sub-munitions (errm… *bullets*)! They are fairly complex and have to be very precisely made. They are manufactured in Austria & Germany. So… probably every major terrorist group has some and the rifle to fire them! LOL Mind you, when I had one, it was kept in two secure field packs (called ‘man portable field packs’). About the size of a large metal briefcase and made of ceramic and armored alloys, and if you didn’t enter two codes correctly, tended to explode violently in your hands! You wouldn’t have to worry about the loss of your hands though, the 1 foot hole where your chest used to be would make that a very minor problem. 😉
Depleted Uranium is very inaccurate term. By *deplted*, they mean this the reactor fuel rods used to make DU munitions can no longer sustain a reaction cost effectively (so called, *spent* fuel rods). They are actually still highly radioactive. And rather than figure out how to store them safely for the thousands of years required, the USA came up with the novel approach of making them into ammunition and so make the whole thing someone else’s problem. 🙂 DU munitions are used in a wide variety of weapons systems, such as the Phalanx CIWS (Close In Weapons System) used to protect US Navy ships from aircraft and missiles. We use the CIWS, but use tungsten (in fact, Australia developed the tungsten munition for the CIWS – pronounced *seewiz*). But the USA prefers DU. They have a lot of spent fuel rods to dispose of, and peace won’t do it! 😀
I am sure you wanted to know all that! LOL 😉
BTW… The major problem with DU munitions isn’t the uranium itself. On impact, the munition compresses rapidly, and a radioactive gas is released. It can float around for awhile, and anyone in the vicinity inhale it. eventually, the small gas cloud dissipates and settles on the ground, and poisons it for a very long time. Anything grown on that soil will be toxic, or it can seep into the water table. Either way… what was that about the terrible long term effects on civilians of cluster munitions? Long term, they are nothing compared to the effects of DU munitions! The USA has used thousands of rounds of DU munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan (All those Americans stoking on Afghan opium will really be able to *light up their day* eventually!)
Schools out!
Oh… And yeah… KI would be a whole LOT better! *sigh* I wish…
You and Bryan would be welcome to join me hipparchia (sadly, I am not certain about the cat’s though! But I am sure something could be worked out)! 😀 (And anyone else who is sane and reasonably sensible)… 😉 LOL
I plan on it truth be told… one day… I have some things to deal with first, and some money to make! 😀 Then… I’m gone! And I don’t want to even see a phone or any other communications, including TV! Peace…. that will be so nice, just some peace… yeah.
Hmmm… I got to thinking about this some more… and my comment above about my training. Any soldier with any special forces, or marines with advanced training is trained to improvise. I just realised that one of the major Bushworld talking points over the past five years, is that only terrorists use IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices). anyone who’s had training similar to myself will tell you that is a flat-out lie! My Grandfather was taught to constrict IED’s in WW2! He taught me, and the Military taught me a whole lot more. So, I guess that makes any US marine and special forces member a terrorist by the definition of the current Administration and assorted nutjobs. 🙂
Strange that I haven’t heard that mentioned anywhere, and strange I hadn’t thought of it before now. Wonder why that is?
No, no, no, Kryten, it’s only the “bad guys” who can rig dead falls, make napalm, use fertilizer for explosives, make chemical weapons with a visit to the grocery store – the “good guys” would never do those things.
“The good guys” would never take whatever is available and make it go BOOM!!! [occasionally with fabulous colors] just to win. That wouldn’t be cricket.
[Don’t get me started on lawn and garden shops, or auto salvage yards.]
I don’t know if you have ever seen the show, MacGyver, but, except where they made deliberate substitutions to avoid people “doing this at home” it was fairly accurate, but people missed the point that this knowledge is not exactly restricted.
not-exactly restricted knowledge… one of the local libraries here had an old set of chemistry reference books, which included such neat stuff as making explosives from playing cards. i used to spend hours in that section of the library. when i checked back a few years later, the books were gone.
Dupont’s Blasters Handbook was a required text in many architectural programs, and they did a lot of things with fertilizer for clearing sites. Apparently you could blast without a permit in a lot of places if you didn’t use official explosives.
You get most of the information you need by reading warning labels. I mean things like “don’t mix this with that as it releases poisonous gas” is a bit of a recipe.
Acetate is unstable at the best of times. Nitroglycerin doesn’t involve a chemistry degree [unless you want to stay alive, but that’s a different story].
Yes, they keep trying to make the world safe for Republicans and children, but it doesn’t take much effort to figure these things out.
yep, that would be why, after a childhood of i wonder what would happen if i mix this… and this… i decided i’d better get a degree in the stuff.
That’s a safer way of pursuing one’s interest, and it keeps the “officials” at bay. Start drawing diagrams and their eyes glaze over.
only slightly safer.
That was in Irondequoit, what do you expect? [I lived in Rochester for a decade.]
You should have seen the turn out when Monroe County decided to require an inventory of local educational chemistry labs and all of the out of date organic acids had to be disposed of… by the bomb squad.
I especially loved the conversion that went –
You shouldn’t have detonated that in the parking lot, officer!
Excuse me, but all we did was close the lid on the bomb bucket. It detonated itself.
As I remember it was a small bottle, a couple of ounces, brown, with a totally unreadable label and a heavily corroded cap found in the back of a cabinet at a college lab.
at a guess, picric acid. it detonates itself quite often, and school chemistry labs used to keep it handy [i forget what it’s most used for, though i used to know]. i’ve seen it in solution ranging anywhere from pale yellow to a brownish color. ether will detonate unexpectedly too, but it’s not all that corrosive by itself.
i only got to actually work directly with the bomb squad once. my job was to go in and look at whatever was there and see if it could be moved without fear of it killing anybody, either by blowing up or giving off toxic fumes. most of the time, the logisitics involved in getting our bomb squad people and stuff to a site, if they were needed, took enough time that i was already being shipped off to the next site before the fun stuff started happening.
When I was in College, our Science lab blew up one summer night (luckily, it was night and empty!) The investigation turned up that the Chem teacher had not properly sealed a container of sodium, and left it near the windows in the afternoon sun. He’d has some family emergency and left in a hurry. It was a hot day, that became a cold night. The kerosene (I think it was kero) it was in evaporated, and the condensation did the rest. There’s a reason why they used to use sodium in torpedoes and depth charges. 😉
Science can be fun! 😀 😉
They were looking for acids, so picric acid was probably the one, and no one had used it for years.
The safety officer at the college was a bit upset by the storage methods, as if the cabinet happened to be struck with force, as in someone tripping and falling against it, there would have been a number of nasty reactions taking place if the bottles with glass stoppers tipped over.
I was just coordinating between government agencies, so it wasn’t my problem, per se, but I wasn’t a happy camper when the damn thing blew up spontaneously. If it had done that in the lab, the local fire department was volunteer, and not terribly well trained in chemical fires. Bust down a door and flood the area with water was what they did, and I wasn’t comfortable that that would have been a good idea.
Ever been to an engine fire in a VW – parts of the engine are magnesium.
Sodium blows up in reaction to water.
Chlorine is highly toxic.
Humans can’t live without sodium chloride – odd old world we live in.
ever eat a pine tree? parts of it are edible. sorry, couldn’t help myself.
they used to make magnesium ladders. lightweight, strong, durable. burns incredibly hot and fast, and bright, all of which is definitely a bug not a feature if you’re, say, an electrician.
yep. sodium + water = kablooie! so it’s usually stored in kerosene.
back in the day, picric acid was in every high school and college chemistry lab just about. perchloric acid is another one that gets more dangerous with time spent sitting around, but i don’t think it was as widely used in schools.
the ironclad rule, when i had non-chemists working with me on big jobs was: don’t touch anything, not even to get a better look at the label; write down whatever the label says, even if you can only see part of it; if the name starts with p and ends with c, stop what you’re doing and come get me; if you even think the name might start with p and end with c, come get me. there were a few false alarms where the ‘come get me’ turned out to be for bottles of phosphoric acid, which is relatively benign, at least in the explosiveness category, but i considered it well worth it. nobody ever got blown up on any of my jobs.
In Cambodia, we had to be very careful on weapons search details. Some places had crates of old WW2 vintage dynamite that head been stored and never moved for decades. they became extremely volatile and would explode if you were careless. Hell, sometimes they exploded when you looked at them! Not to mention the assorted vintage RPG’s and mines etc! I started to think we wouldn’t have to kill the KR, they would take care of that themselves! LOL
There’s no laxative made as powerful as seeing beads on a stick of dynamite.
I still fight with the squirrels over pine nuts, though most people, even some who eat in Italian restaurants, don’t realize where they come from.
I’m attempting to grow some sunflowers and the bloody squirrels had better not attempt to muscle in, because they are right next to the house and the ferals are near by. Actually I planted ‘nip next to them as a “guard bribe”.
Real magnesium alloy wheels are another trip, if someone has a blow out at speed.
Where we lived in Germany was on the path to the Ardenne on the German/Belgium/Luxembourg border, and things appeared with the spring plowing.
Lots artillery rounds from every army.
My Mother blamed it on her brother who was a tanker with Patton.
guard bribe! good idea. let us know if it works.
heh. i try to blame my brother for as many things as possible too. 😀
I’ll probably end up with the sunflowers crushed by the guards.
Hmmm! Good luck with the sunflowers Bryan! 😀 If that doesn’t work, you could try electrified chicken wire! 😉 LOL
Squirrels laugh at electrified fences, they are evil, insane creatures out to control the world – everyone knows that. Where do you think the jihadists get their tactics from – watching squirrels. Suicider squirrels will short out the electrical grid so the foraging units can strip your bird feeders and nut trees.
You must not have squirrels “Down Under”.
Hmmm. I don’t think we do… I’ve never seen one here anyway! We have possums… they are bad enough! And we don’t gave gophers either! I thought that gophers and raccoons were the terrorists there? LadyMin is always complaining about them! 😀
I think I prefer our snakes etc! Much easier to deal with I think!
Good luck then!
How about automated flamethrowers?
LOL
Actually… we do have evil Rosella’s! They will send out a couple scouts to see if you have a shotgun or something, and if you don’t do anything, they call all their friends and will strip a huge almond or walnut tree in a couple days! And if you get the garden hose out or yell at them, they sit on the branches and tell you off, very loudly! And they laugh at you too!
LadyMin saw them when she was here, she thought they were pretty, ’cause they are red and multi-colored… and then they started yelling at her too! LOL Even cat’s don’t scare them!
I looked up Rosellas and first thought you were off the deep end complaining about budgies for crying out loud. Then about two-thirds of the way down the page you start to see the pest control pages about them.
They sound like the drunken robins we get in the Spring that raid the camphor trees for berries on their way North. Hordes of the noisy pests passing purple berries through their system and dropping them all over everything.
The big different is that the Rosellas apparentlycrush the seeds, rather than just passing them through, so they are no use to the plants, and they strip everything that’s edible.
They’ve killed all of the large snakes that controlled the rodent population, so it’s feral cats or poison to control rats and mice.
Hah! Trust me m8… If you had Rosella’s, you wouldn’t think they were just budgies! If you work night shift, or up late and need to sleep in past 5 AM, you have no hope in hell without industrial earplugs or sound proofing!
And check out the cockies (sulfur-crested cockatoos) & Galah’s too! They are a lot bigger and just as bad! Cockies can live 65 years or so, and they are apparently one of the more intelligent avian species. People (stupid people) are starting to have them as pets. *sigh* The problem being that when a cockie decides you live in a good area, it will get all it’s friends, and you can kiss that neighborhood goodbye! A flock of cockies will destroy any smaller trees in no time, and destroy your house too, especially if it’s timber.
Check this out:
Cockies’ peck wreck
Info and an MP3 of a cocky here. Multiply the sound by 20-100, and you get the idea!
Sulphur-crested Cockatoo
Galah
So, as well as the most venomous snakes and spiders, we also have the noisiest and most destructive birds known to man! LOL
I’ll let LadyMin tell you about the blackbirds here that she got to meet having lunch one day! LOL Maybe she’ll post a couple pic’s. 😉
Who says Mother Nature doesn’t have a nasty sense of humor!
I still think the Rosellas were pretty. They were also destructive. Here’s a naughty Rosella stripping apricots from a tree. There were 4 or 5 more of them up there yelling at me. The nerve.
The blackbirds were just plain evil! This one swooped in and started eating the frys right off a plate. I wasn’t going to try and chase it away. There was a second one sitting on a nearby railing; keeping guard I would imagine.
As for squirrels… I have lots of them and would be willing to export them to anyone that wants them! They especially like my yard because I have a walnut tree. They build nests in the nearby elm tree and there is no getting rid of them.
I “baby-sat” Felipe, a severe macaw for six-months. Understand that severes are small macaws.
He went through two 1½-inch hardwood dowels in his cage a month; he savaged a neighbor’s 16-pound tom cat, who was planning on a free meal; he bit a gold Cross pen in half when the stupid vet, who assured me he was familiar with large birds and didn’t need the welding gauntlets I offered, attempted to inspect his beak. Felipe loved my sister-in-law, but generally felt the rest of the world needed to be torn apart.
I handled him with welding gauntlets, and the knowledge that he would sit quietly on my shoulder. His wings were clipped, so he enjoyed rides in my VW convertible perched on the rear view mirror with his wings spread. Other than the fact that he crapped all over everything, we generally got along much better than he got along with my brother.
Felipe caused several thousand dollars worth of damage to the wood siding and railings of my brother’s condo, as cedar isn’t much of a challenge to a beak that can pierce Coke cans.
An adult severe macaw can wake the dead if it decides it is time to shriek. Understand I could push 450 watts through my Bose 901 speakers, and they were no match for him. It only happened if I forgot to do certain end of the day procedures, so I only forgot once.
Anyone who chooses to keep a member of the parrot/macaw group in their house is certifiable.
My Mother would be unlimbering her 16 gauge if she saw them near an apricot, Lady Min.
That looks to be big enough to be a raven, although the beak looks wrong. It’s bigger than our crows, to be sure.