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Bulldozers are ripping apart Big Bend National Park. Conservationists are furious.

Heavy construction equipment has appeared inside Big Bend National Park in southern Texas as contractors for Customs and Border Protection begin a land assessment. The work is a precursor to a massive border security project that opponents say will profoundly reshape the character of one of the state's most pristine landscapes. As onlookers stood by, bulldozers crashed through native cottonwoods and willows growing alongside the Rio Grande, scattering birds and pig-like javelinas. Raymond Skiles, a former wildlife biologist and wilderness coordinator who worked in the park until 2018, posted on social media that the event would go down as "a day of infamy." "The needless border wall's rip and tear across the fabric of this national treasure began yesterday," he said in a Facebook post, adding that "in the desert, there is no more valuable habitat than where the trees grow. ... This is what they chose to destroy first..."

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Once the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, the United States had a huge army in Iraq and a smaller but still significant one in Afghanistan, and it could not recruit or retain enough troops to staff both. Rather than reinstate the draft as in Vietnam, they looked for another solution.

There was serious discussion in 2005 and 2006 about bringing back conscription. A “Reinstate the Draft” bill went into Congress because there was broad recognition that the military was breaking and needed more bodies. Rumsfeld dismissed that option. George W. Bush said he would have vetoed it if it passed, and in the end it didn’t. They were haunted by the memory of Vietnam and the role the draft played in turning the US public against that war and forcing withdrawal in 1973.

With the Iraq war already unpopular, they feared a draft would be the final straw. So, rather than conscription, they dismantled regulations built up since Vietnam. Some of this was public. They raised the enlistment age from thirty-five to forty-two. They loosened rules on body weight so heavier people could sign up.

What I wanted to investigate was the groups they were not advertising, the ones being quietly enfranchised by this new free-for-all that the Pentagon was embarrassed about and trying to hide. The first and most obvious were neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Over three decades, the military had put in place specific rules to keep such people out. The reasons were straightforward. Sending neo-Nazis and white supremacists into a country of mostly brown people with automatic weapons is not going to end well. Those same people then come back to the United States or serve on domestic bases. They are often highly violent, with an accelerationist, sometimes openly terroristic outlook, and they can turn US-funded training into a resource for what they call a “racial holy war” at home.

Those protective regulations were effectively switched off. When I started talking to neo-Nazis and their organizations, they all told me the same thing: “We have never had it this good in the US military. We can get in with swastikas, we can get in with SS bolts.” That was the starting point for a yearslong investigation.

I found they were not just being tolerated; some were promoted. One of the central figures in the book is Forrest Fogarty, who served in Iraq in 2004–5. He is an American History X–style neo-Nazi, completely open about his politics. When I met him, he told me that his commanders all knew he was a Nazi and liked it. They sent him on the hardest missions because they thought he was “hardcore.”

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

Do you fancy a fine fabric ? - (2023)

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)