beavers

The more you read history the more you realize there are no good guys.  There are some really bad guys, so maybe the guys fighting them are a little better in those cases, but that is as good as anybody gets.  We think we are the good guys because we are us, but everybody else thinks the same about their country.  Pretty much everybody on our side is in it for the money or whatever they think they can get out of it and not because they think we are in the right and they love America.  Go figure.

When I was a little kid I used to think of my rise to power, mayor, governor, president, and at last head of the United Nations, the most powerful man in all the world.  Har.  I don't know who the head is now or has been since hum, some Pakistani guy I think, oh there he is, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and then only because he had those repeating names.  There's the big boy council with us, Britain, France, Russia, and those Red Chinese who can veto anything they don't like, and then there is everybody else who can piss and moan all they like and they generally like,  It's not an independent entity, every country in the world has some kind of input, however small so there's not a lot of agreement, and if there is anything the US does not like we veto it or ignore it.  We went into Korea flying the flag of the UN, and when we withdrew the reason was most decidedly not because the UN told us to.


Wag the Dog was a good movie.  Woody Harrelson had one of his classic, though minor roles. As Old Dog says at the time we were getting into the Balkans and the scuttlebutt was that Clinton was doing that to distract attention from the stained blue dress, but I think that was just coincidental.

The Red Chinese can mass 150K troops at the drop of a hat wherever and whenever and we never know why.  They don't want to conquer North Korea because who wants to try to run that hellhole and they don't want to fuck with it severely because of all the resultant refuges on their border,  They would like the current Kim to tone it down, but you know, kids.

Those colonial countries used to complain about all those artificial borders being the cause for their troubles, but that was years ago, they have had plenty of time to readjust them, but they haven't because they won't concede any square inch of land that was ever part of their country.  It does look like the Kurds may be able to take the northern parts of Iraq and Syria, these troubled mideast times are good for them, but of course they are only in it for the Kurds.


But what I wanted to talk about was beavers.  There was some article in the news the other day about breaking up some beaver dam in the far out burbs.  Apparently this happens all the time.  What is it with beavers?  Oh I get it that they like to create those shallow pools to protect themselves from predators, but wouldn't you think that tail would, whack, send the coyote off spitting out his teeth?

But I thought the tail had something to do with packing the mud and sticks together to make a dam. Does the beaver think he is making a dam to make himself a nice place to live or does he just have some genetic tic that makes him enjoy slapping sticks and mud together?

There used to be some nice trees on the Chicago River just south of the Merchandise Mart, but when they cleaned up the river the beavers came back and gnawed them down.  Nobody had thought of that.  And were the beavers thinking they could dam the Chicago river?  Did they have high hopes?   Strangely enough in that song it is a ram butting a beaver dam.  I don't think anybody knows why.

I read a story some years ago about some guy who had a piece of land but the beavers kept putting up dams, or this one beaver anyway, and the guy was a nature lover and he loved animals including that beaver, as a matter of fact he acquired a grudging respect for it because everything he did to try to dissuade it, that high hoping rodent kept right on gnawing it and in the end the guy had to shoot it. Sad story.

You know you read these stories about how hunters or fisherman have some bear or big fish that they are always trying to trap or catch, but it eludes them every time and so they develop an affection for it.  I wonder if Beagles has ever experienced anything like that or is it just a silly sentimental story told by city folks.

And inasmuch as those 88 acres are swampy what is the story of beavers in Beaglesonia?