Prompted by Pompey Road in comments, I went looking for some commercials that have been running in rural West Virginia, put out by a company called Walker/Cat that makes heavy machinery for coal operations. (George W. Bush spoke at their Belle plant in 2002.) Turns out they're right here. They have to be seen to be believed.
Here, Miss Bug explains that heck no, blowing up mountains, dumping the rubble in streams, and covering the result with a thin layer of soil and grass monoculture doesn't "bug" her at all, ha ha!
In fact, life fairly blossoms in the wake of MTR!
Miss Bug's husband Mr. Bug says that despite what those activist judges tell you, he and his kind just move out briefly during the mountain-blowing-up process. After that they move right back in! Anyway, he doesn't need electricity in his house. Do you?
Miners are almost artistic in their use of equipment to blow up mountains and dump the rubble in streams.
WV needs two things: the kids off our damn lawns and enormous mining machines on every mountain!
After all, you dirty California hippies don't even know where your electricity comes from, dude!
In fact, if there's one thing that kicks more ass than coal, it's roads! WV can't afford to be a two-lane state in a four-lane century, can she?
That's only scratching the surface. There are more.
Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things
Comments
View as Flat
Pathos Posted 5:59 am
19 Feb 2008
I think I'm going to go wash the imaginary coal dust and bullsh*t out of my eyes before it starts seeping into my brain.
Thanks, DR. I was having a nice, carefree afternoon...
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Penfold007 Posted 6:55 am
19 Feb 2008
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Pompey Road Posted 7:13 am
19 Feb 2008
It was not that our intelligence was insulted enough with the commercial by Walker/Cat telling us its ok to do a Mountain Top Removal and a Valley Fill now they have come up with another one with a lady bug telling us its ok to cover up a stream. I feel it is because some environmental groups that have not been successful in the past in court attacking them strictly on the MTR issue has found a chink in the coal corporations armor with the clean water act. I believe the states may have had some stream protection bills passed in recent years that allow the groups to go after coal corporations who destroy fresh water streams
The old timers had it right back when they all had private wells and you could drink right out of most streams around here. Most birds don't crap their own nest and you don't mess where you eat. Of course that is putting it delicately as for how they really said it.
We have a few fresh water springs left in Pike County where you can still bottle the water right out of the stream and sell it. For the most part though we are spending millions of dollars running what we call "city water" into every community. The water we once had being ruined by strip mining for the most part. We have better health departments now but the frequent boil water advisories remind us of what is really in that lake and river water they are trying to clean up for us to drink. I don't like the taste of the chlorine and it is a constant reminder of what kind of fecal matter bacteria it is trying to cover up. Fresh clean, clear water one of the basic elements of life, are you really going to let a cartoon bug tell you its ok to destroy fresh mountain streams. Tell me what do you get out of that multi-million dollar piece of equipment that Walker/Cat sells? Especially the ones that covers up that fresh water stream.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pompey Road Posted 7:24 am
19 Feb 2008
Biography of a Cartoon Bug
Hi, I am the cartoon bug from the Walker/Cat commercial that is now running on TV in this area. I am helping them promote Mountain top Removal and Hollow Fill in WV and East Kentucky. My name is Mr. Bug and I am on that courtroom bench waiting for the gavel to fall, be a merciful end compared to what I have been through. I was living a good life in a cartoon valley with a bunch of other cartoon characters before they did a cartoon mountain top removal and cartoon hollow fill. I drifted around for a while watching my other cartoon buddies find work, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, The Road Runner. No one would hire me because of my relationship with Walker/Cat and Hollow fill mining. You know the liberal, tree hugging Hollywood type's. The stigma connected with the association killed my acting career. I tried to rehabilitate my career by doing a year in the Peace Corps and joining the Sierra Club and Green Peace. A lot of good it did me. I went to a Hollywood event to raise money to fight Global Warming just to get bitch slapped by Al Gore. Scorned and penniless I had to come back after the Hollow fill was finished. Now I am hung out here on this barren plateau, cold wind blowing up my butt with a bulls eye on my back. The target of every hungry Sparrow and Red Bird that fly's by. I feel like Bill after he got caught with Monica, everybody is watching me now. I had good cover back in my old cartoon valley. I would love to find me some warm Drift Shaft mine to crawl back into but I got to stay here. They made me do it, tortured me pulled my wings off, holding my grandpa as hostage at this very moment. Holding a can of Raid on him and threatening to throw him in a bug zapper. I got PTSD, my nerves are shot, took to snorting pills and trying to get on the draw. Thanks a lot Walker/Cat you are singing "Almost Level West Virginia" and I am stuck here singing the blues.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pompey Road Posted 8:15 am
19 Feb 2008
Can't get a local paper to run this one, not that funny but you may get some insight about why they do MTR if you don't already know.
Miss Bug
I am the lady bug on the Walker/Cat commercials promoting burying streams in Kentucky and West Virginia. Well I am a bug but I ain't no lady, Walker/Cat threw bail for me on a prostitution rap. Got caught with my wings in the air if you catch my drift. I used to work in Vegas at the Mustang Ranch for horse flys before they started running medical checks on the hookers. It was costing them so much in penicillin they threw me out on my well-used backside. I had to start working for pimps like Walker/Cat selling buried streams and valley fills. I will have to admit that being in the worlds oldest profession was no great shame until I started working for a sleezy corporation like Walker/Cat. I used to sell my @$$ not lie it off, no I can't come back to a stream after it has been covered up. How stupid can you people be out there, ITS COVERED UP, HOW IN THE HELL CAN YOU COME BACK TO A STEAM THAT'S BURRIED. Sorry about the little emotional outbreak I'm strung out on crystal meth and got the DT's from trying to quit drinking. My old man "Mr. Bug" is on one of Walker/Cats commercials promoting Mountain Top Removal and he dumped me when I did the " its ok to bury a stream commercial". Said he could put up with me being a whore but could not stand a liar. Thanks a lot Walker/Cat had an honorable profession but since you pimped me out for your bury a steam commercial I've been moth balled. My tail is burning and I ain't no firefly. My face is red on the commercial because I am ashamed of what I am saying.
Anthropomorphism the tendency for humans to apply human like qualities to animals. Worked well when you were learning to read, little animals in the books to keep you interested. Sesame Street followed the same concept using animals to teach. It did not take advertising long to discover the power in anthropomorphic commercials, Tigers to sell you cornflakes, and a gas company putting a tiger in your tank, silly Rabbit selling Trix. I saw one the other day with a couple of birds selling a window washing agent and another bunny selling batteries. Don't laugh and say you are above making a purchase from an anthropomorphic animated cartoon character. I just bought some insurance from a lizard.
A Walker/Cat official can't come out here and say this stuff with a straight face. They use a courtroom scene to lend a little subconscious credibility to the whole affair and run a cartoon bug out on you. They just use these commercials in this demographic area. They are betting on you people being the stereotypical dumb hillbilly type and not wake up out of your reality show stupor long enough for it to hit you, Hey, that's a bug telling me to do a mountain top removal. People that bug ain't real, that lizard ain't real.
Wyoming coal is 10 times lower in sulfur and you don't even have to wash it. 100 foot thick seams laying just below the ground and the only way Eastern Coal Corporations can compete is by quitting the original contour mining and just blow the top off a mountain and push the overburden into a pristine valley.
When they drift shaft mined and employed thousands you might see some kind of trade off. They use about one third the number of personnel to strip as they did to drift shaft mine. There is not enough money coming back into the community to justify doing Mountain Top Removal and Valley Fills. It should pinch your conscious just knowing you are allowing it, the fact you are doing it because a Cartoon Bug told you to speaks volume's about what Walker/Cat thinks about your overall intelligence.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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cwistomoweina Posted 2:36 pm
19 Feb 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 3:53 pm
19 Feb 2008
Now the majority of supreme court justices will not hear an ACLU suit on the wiretapping? Why? Because no one has "standing" to sue. Why no standing?
The information that proves a specific person was wiretapped illegally is top secret. They won't order the secrets opened until someone with standing can sue.
Really most of US are just that dumb, easily swayed by trendy enthusiasm you might say. Mass delusion or is it something in the water? Yes we can, yes we can! Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 6:02 pm
19 Feb 2008
I shall watch the videos, when the hour for permissible audio has arrived.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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RHY Posted 10:43 pm
19 Feb 2008
They sure are !^(&%&*@ us without so much as a single kiss! What next? Miss Bug telling Raytheon Rep. that cluster bombs don't harm her one little bit, but would help people meet their maker swiftly?
What about that windshield Miss Bug?
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Pompey Road Posted 11:36 pm
19 Feb 2008
Another piece sent in to local papers, will they print it in the heart of coal country.
We shall see
Stereotypical Hillbilly
I know we now have a festival that's celebrates backwardness so I am sorry if this offends anyone who wants to hang on to stigma that goes with the title. The perception is killing us on a hundred different levels', if they lost the term it would not bother me. It really hit home as to how Corporations perceive us when Walker/Cat started running the pro Mountain Top Removal and pro cover up a stream commercials using a Mr. Bug and a Miss Bug in a courtroom setting. No Walker/Cat official would get on TV and make such ridiculous claims and even slightly tempt the truth in advertising concept. They would lose all credibility, as would any elected official who got up and promoted Mountain Top Removal and Valley Filling. It is a hard argument to make in print or in a crowd of educated people. They do not run these spots nationally just down here in the Kentucky and West Virginia markets. They have been put on YouTube and they are the bunt of many jokes and are the laughing stock on blog sites in the rest of the country. It bothers me to think the rest of the country thinks we are dumb enough to be talked into Mountain Top Removal and covering fresh water streams by a couple of cartoon bugs. Educators and local politicians no matter how you feel about MTR should petition Walker/Cat to stop running these spots in this local market. Get the teachers and students involved, should make for some interesting papers. They have the right to run pro MTR commercials, just please try to come up with something that will support their argument for the practice other than a couple of cartoon bugs. If you are pro MTR they are hurting your cause and making everybody involved with it look like fools. You should also ask them to come up with something that would have some influence on people over 3rd grade level.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pompey Road Posted 1:10 am
20 Feb 2008
It was like watching lemmings march off a cliff, only I believe King George knew what he was doing. No one pulled the wool over his eyes or his little buddy from Haliburton.
Half of us were watching Monday Night Football or American Idol. The other half was listening to the guy sing God Bless the USA, Greenwood I think his name was, thought he had an envrionmentally PC name.
Its a major drawback to no child left behind when you just teach the test no one can make an opinion on their own. You only believe what you are told.
The other part is the excitement of the going to war fervor without thinking of how you will feel 5 or 6 years down the road.
We are a fast paced nation, fast cars, fast food, to impatient to fight long wars. Our concept of time cost us to lose another war we should not have taken on. We sent our men over for a 1 year tour, or officers for just 6 months. The North Vietnamese come down the trail for the duration with just one way back home. In victory or in a box. Willing in a war of attrition to accept 1.4 million casualities and 14 years of war. We start getting the lets get out blues when we lose the first couple of thousand and its not over in two years.
We learned nothing from the past. The North Vietnamese taught the world how to fight America. Draw them into a long protracted insurgancy and bleed them over time. The American people have neither the stomach nor the patience for it.
Its funny how we spend billions on the C.I.A. for so called intelligence, highest payed military advisors in the world and the common man on the street knows more about stratigic planning than all of them put together.
The slowest corporal from the Vietnam area would have asked the question, What If?
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:57 am
20 Feb 2008
Now only 20% are happy about the present course. 80% unhappy. This has got to be some kind of political/cultural deflection point..again.
I looked up the Coal War on wikipedia and found the Mother Jones entry. Great stuff, especially for this election cycle. Hillary ought to have modeled herself on Jones, no problem winning then.
It's probably too late now.
This reminds me of the Calument strike in the UP here.
http://www.1913massacre.com/
There was a matriachial figure involved there as well.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Pompey Road Posted 3:16 am
20 Feb 2008
It is my hope that if we can save Blair Mountain in West Virginia from Mountain Top Removal a monument should be dedicated to her and the men who died in that Union Coal War. On that very mountain and get the mountain on the National Historic Register.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:47 am
20 Feb 2008
Barack tapped into the civil rights movement to claim his credibility.
Hillary answered with the Lyndon Johnson (the man with the special tayloring request) reference.
It's errors in judgement like that you can't make. LBJ has to be amonst the most despised presidents and he surely pisses off the Kennedy clan! What WAS she thinking?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Pompey Road Posted 4:53 am
20 Feb 2008
War on poverty, great society program, I feel he could have ended poverty in our time. Free Wheeling, Free dealer left over from the Roosevelt era.
Bigger than life Texan who thought he could have his war and social programs also. Guns or Butter, not the first one to go trip over Ike's Industrial Military Complex warning, I fear he won't be the last.
Ironic there was a militry jail or stockade that went by his handle, "LBJ" Long Binh Jail that probably did not add to his popularity. Half a million G.I.s with LBJ's hired gun inked on their steel pot covers secured his legacy.
Sorry to go trippin down memory lane there, but that name still evokes a lot of negative responce.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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caniscandida Posted 7:21 am
20 Feb 2008
Certainly dear ol' Pompey Road's idea about a campaign of counter-ads makes a great deal of sense. But to that I would add that in general, the citizens of a democracy such as ours in the US need to be educated in suspicion, and even in cynicism. We need to learn that when an industry throws lots of money into an ad campaign showing how beneficial and pleasant their product is, the industry is lying to us somewhere.
TV ads for Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Hummers, coal, and cotton -- "the fabric of our lives": the cotton industry has always had great ads; the latest shows a gorgeous, falsely colored monocrop field, of a plant that is environmentally terrificly unfriendly, and brutal to workers -- are indeed beautiful works of art. At the same time, they are horrendous lies, our falling for which amounts to great sorrow in the long run for us, for other human beings, for other living creatures, and for the health of the Earth.
Now that I have seen all the posted Walker/Cat ads, I can say that the one with the animals and the birdsong is very attractive, as is the one with the old men on the porch playing checkers. But the ones with the Bugs are indeed ridiculous, as is the one with the California "dude" smashing his computer.
So there is a regional issue on top of this, which the aboriginal Kentuckyan DR may understand, as well as Pompey Road: Is the "you" in "This is how dumb they think you are" referring to Southern Appalachian folks from Loretta Lynn Country, western VA, eastern KY and most of WV?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 7:29 am
20 Feb 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/2/17/105644/904/#8. ...
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Pompey Road Posted 8:06 am
20 Feb 2008
Now the area is like Sherwood Forest we can not go in there to where the coal stripping is being done with the Army Corps of Engineer blessing. We don't mind being dragged down to Pikeville district court and in fact we have but federal charges make it difficult to go in and monitor the destruction. You can go to google earth and see old satellite views from 2500 feet. Fishtrap Dam Pike County Kentucky. Pan from side to side going up the watershed area.
They do not do an environmental impact study when they run miles of gas well roads in there. You can't see them for the folage in the flyover pics.
None of course is required by law before they strip. It is a corps of engineer flood control project. Go figure
I believe the Native American Indian tribes should be able to go in there and search for artifacts at least before a coal corporation strips a sector of the land. Many were found on the lower end when the Dam was being constructed.
Mountain Grouse is my only area of expertise, very sensitive to their environment. Cold wet springs during the egg production months can obliterate them almost. They seem to come in and out of healthy numbers in cycles. I know of people down here who have been successful in raising quail or pheasant. I have seen people use poultry wire through the trees in large area's trying to raise a mountain grouse with no success.
I feel our native bee is endangered up there but know the most productive mountain grouse territory I have ever seen is being obliterated.
The introduction of foreign species by fish & wildlife such as coyote is stressing them also.
You can walk in but the gas company and coal company employee's are allowed to use ATV's on the coal and gas company roads. If you are as fit as a special forces or marine you might be able to go in and monitor but the amount of territory to cover is beyond my physical limits. You can go in by boat but no camping is allowed on the shore.
I assume Native Tribe representatives could get escorted in if they got permission.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pompey Road Posted 1:42 am
21 Feb 2008
The French have sometimes accused of being a little eccentric and a little snobbish to Americans. I don't know why considering we are the prime reason they are not all speaking German now but that aside they do have some common sense ideas from time to time. In some of their water purification facilities instead of a lot of costly equipment to monitor the water quality they have a trout swimming in a clear glass or plastic tube. If a trout can survive in the water it is totally consumable for humans.
We have a species of game bird native to Pike County that is another good indicator of the condition of your forest environment. Some of us may remember when trekking through the mountains a medium sized bird that would explode from under your feet and fly off with a pair of the noisiest wings you ever heard. It seems they hold cover sometimes until you just about step on them then just about cause you to have a heart attack when they bust up from cover under you feet. That was probably a Ruffed Grouse, some hunters here in Pike County still hunt them with or without dogs but their numbers are dwindling. They are very sensitive to their environment and prefer old growth forest. They come in and out of substantial numbers in cycles of 10 to 12 years. No one seems to know why but they may be very scarce for years and then seem prolific for a few years. They live on the ground and trees and they eat, buds, leaves, berries, seeds and insects or in other words are omnivores. Their numbers are decreasing across the continent especially Pike County due to habitat loss. They are forest birds, they need trees, that cartoon bug may be able to come back to a Mountain Top Removal & Valley fill but I challenge anybody from Walker/Cat or the coal industry to prove a Ruffed Grouse will return to a MTR & Valley fill. It's easy to write off a bug especially if it is just a cartoon that's why they did not put a Ruffed Grouse on that commercial.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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