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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Just An Honest Mistake 

...it's your problem, really. If it weren't for the sad fact that you are a terrorist-loving, America-hating liberal member of the Democrat party wallowing in the sordid depths of dementia induced from your bitter, unreasoned hatred for George W. Bush, you would be lucid enough to understand that the exclusion of evolutionary biology as an eligible major under the new federal "Smart Grant" program for low-income college students was just simply a mistake. Like you've never made a simple mistake, eh, loser?

Hey, it's a big list, and what with all this competitive sourcing crap that the federal government has been going through in an effort to turn most governmental functions over to Halliburton and the like, there's damned few actual federal employees left to actually do things like proof-read lists that may just make or break the college aspirations of people at the bottom of the economic ladder who are trying to pull themselves up to a better life. A spokesperson admitted today that it was just a simple foolish mistake, and that should be good enough for you. It is simple a bit of chance that evolutionary biology was omitted from the list rather than...say...Aquatic Biology/Limnology (26.1304) or Acoustics (40.0809) or even Turkic, Ural-Altaic, Caucasian, and Central Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other (16.1599). But will you accept that perfectly reasonably excuse? NOOoooo...

You probably think that you have the perfect excuse to reject this whole episode as a simple mistake. You'll no doubt bring up that whole 'WMD in Iraq' thing, possibly nearly gag on your Starbucks beverage of choice as you wave that ragged old strawman about how Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until we invaded, and drag up any number of other cheap insults about our brave, stalwart President in your effort to make something sinister out of a simple oopsie. The more desperate of you cut 'n runners will probably even want to drag the Medicare drug plan, NSA phone tapping, and privatized Social Security into the discussion. It's embarrassing...

People make mistakes. Political appointees in the Bush Administration are people, too, and they can make mistakes. Their good friends at Bob Jones University make mistakes; their baseline supporters like James Dobsen, Pat Robertson, and a whole host of former Kansas State Board of Eductation members can all make mistakes. Hell, YOU make mistakes (but I repeat myself). The evidence is clear: once the ommision was...uhm...revealed, the Department of Education made haste to fix the problem, albeit very very quietly. But you just won't be satisified; you'll keep fussing and carrying on as if there's some logical connection between this simple honest mistake and those other unfortunate episodes where misguided zealots placed in positions of authority at NASA and other places tried to manipulate scientific endeavor in a fashion favorable to the desires of the Bush administration. There isn't a connection, though. There's no 'there' there. This was just an accident, honestly made. Honest...

You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking otherwise...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

The Powerhouse of Oregon Baseball 

...although baseball has never been the game I hunger for, I have spent my time in the trenches. I spent a number of years in the dugout and on the field of play as a coach in T-ball, coach-pitch, and the Minors and Majors levels of Little League. I can recite the Little League pledge. As a result, I have nothing but admiration for those groups of players who can actually make it to some higher level of play. Oregon isn't a hotspot for baseball; on the west side of the Cascades it rains for too much of the year to have anything approaching a year-round program and on the east side we have often practiced in below-freezing temperatures and had to postpone games because of snow. Let's face it, that's the story of the whole Washington/Oregon/Idaho Pacific Northwest baseball experience: there are games that can be played under a wide variety of weather circumstances, but baseball isn't one of them. Imagine our collective surprise, then, when the Oregon State Beavers not only qualified for but actually won the 2006 NCAA College World Series...

Now, at the risk of jinxing these brave boys, we must ask the question "could it happen again?" The Little League team from Beaverton, a Portland suburb, has advanced to the finals of the American round. They stand within one victory of playing in the championship game of the Little League World Series. We Pac. N.W. types are a generally pessimistic crowd, but the parallels between the run the Beavers made to the College World Series Championship has an erie resemblance to the experience of the Beaverton team: losing the first game, then battling back to the big time through a series of "win or go home" games on the undercard. Destiny is a dicey thing, and nobody in their right mind would slide all the chips onto this particular longshot number. But, as we saw earlier this summer, sometimes destiny has the right kind of raingear to visit the most improbably of locations...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:18 PM 0 comments

File This Under "Stoopid Ideas" 

...in the fall elections, Oregonians will once again be faced with a ballot initiative that would reinstate term limits for state legislators. While I am normally opposed to such nonsense, it is also true that the behavior of some members of the Oregon State legislature cry out for some means of overriding the stary-eyed loons that insist on returning certain of these clowns to Salem with enough experience to slip nutty ideas into legislation. This is a perfect example...

There are only two ways to go with this one. Either the person or persons responsible for this study believe that Sheriff's departments are bloated elephants capable of shifting resources to handle the majoritiy of highway patrolling duties, or they have made the hard-eyed calculation that they can make political hay by shifting the burden of taxation for highway patroling services to the counties while at the same time trumpeting how they reduced state expenditures. It all sounds, at first blush, like a rip-roarin' great idea, and it probably would even sell if it weren't for the fact that there are a sizable number of Oregon residents who live east of the Cascade mountains that roughly divide the state in half east to west. Those people know that their county Sheriff's departments are generally marginally staffed to begin with and, while they may provide some support to the highway patrol function, don't have nearly the resources to take full responsibility for that function without adding more staff and equipment. Klamath County, for example, has one deputy to cover the northern half of the county, spanning an area 70 miles long by at least that much wide, with a lot of mile of three state and federal highways. Somebody's going to pay for the extra help...

Until the state can finally rid itself of a majority count of the strange brand of self-serving right-wingers who had their run in charge over the better part of the last decade in the Oregon legislature, we will have to put up with remaining vestiges of this sort of nonsense. This study is just another version of the same sort of bait and switch game that they have played since day one, claiming that they were acheiving savings of taxpayers money when in truth they were only shifting the burden to some other, more local, taxing entity. Nothing was ever saved at their behest because - as a society - we won't totally abandon certain things that we feel are cultural imperatives, but they were able to talk a good game. Hopefully, this will be the last dying gasp for the right-wing/neocon wing of the Republican party...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:39 PM 0 comments

The Cost of War Comes Home...Again 

...and so they come again to Central Oregon, and far, far too soon. Grim-faced military personnel, this time Marines, have come to the door of another family - this time in Bend - with the horrifying, numbing news that a loved one has died in service to his country. The notification that Lance Corporal Randy Lee Newman has died due to an IED isn’t national news, as was the capture and murder of Army Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker of Madras just two months ago, but the pain felt locally is just as sharp in any case...

Once again we will talk about a promising young life lost before the promise could be fulfilled. Friends and neighbors will remember the qualities that made young Randy Newman a special person, and how he carried himself as a member of the Mountainview High School wrestling team and JROTC program. Bend is a much larger place than Madras, but the sense of community still doesn’t abate. The people who showed up at the Deschutes County Fair Expo Center for the service for Tucker came from all over the region. They will be there again if Newman’s family wishes to have such an open service. It doesn’t matter, at an important level, how you or I feel about our actions in Iraq. Another young man from Central Oregon is coming home to his final rest, and he is to be honored for offering the ultimate sacrifice to his country...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:17 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Requiem For A Man and Time Long Past 

...in the dawning hours of Feb. 19, 1945, the first wave of a force of 30,000 U.S. Marines swept up onto the blasted, cratered black sand beaches of a small volcanic island called Iwo Jima in the Eastern Pacific a mere 750 miles from the home islands of Japan. On the fourth day of battle, a contingent of the Fifth Marine Division managed to fight its way to the top of Mt. Suribachi, the dormant volcano that spawned the island and was the dominant topographic feature. They planted a flag at its summit, but there was a certain dissatifaction because it was...well, too small. A second, much larger flag was scrounged up, and several Marines and a Navy corpsman put it in place. In an almost off-handed gesture, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who passed away on Sunday at age 94, squeezed off a couple of frames of that moment and, in that one impromptu act, produced one of the most iconic images of World War II...
...and carved out a permanent place in American history for the United States Marine Corps...

Four more weeks of fierce, brutal combat lay ahead of this moment, and that fierce effort would take the life of young Joseph House - the apple of his mother’s eye, the son his father had always hoped for, the hero to his three younger sisters, the uncle that my wife would never meet but would hear so much about during her youth - and those of several of those in the shot and 6800 more Americans, along with all but a meager handful of the 21,000 Japanese defenders. Although perhaps not as bloody a campaign as Tarawa or some other lesser known Pacific island invasions, Iwo Jima became a touchstone of sacrifice and patriotism for an American public that had just weathered, weeks earlier, the tense uncertainty of the 101st Airborne Division’s heroic stand at the Battle of the Bulge and was now beginning to sense the full shift of the tide and see that final ultimate victory in the most vicious global conflict that the world had ever seen was not just possible, but likely. Joe Rosenthal’s almost accidental photo atop Suribachi, of all the rolls of film that he shot in this and other battles, became a poster subject, a postage stamp, and a rallying point for bond and material drives in the war effort. It implanted Iwo Jima so firmly in the American conscience that it was almost a natural that there would eventually be an Iwo Jima memorial in Washington, D. C. modeled directly on Rosenthal’s photo...

It’s somewhat surprising, therefore, that the passing of Joe Rosenthal seems to have passed so quietly. I will admit that I was traveling on Monday, but I was still able to hear the news and catch NPR now and again. Maybe they mentioned it and I missed it (that is very likely the case). It may well be that only brief mention was given that I missed; there’s enough crazy badness going on in the world right now that the passing of this one man and the memory of that one particular accomplishment, which matters most to only the most elderly of America’s citizens, could fall through some cracks. But as a child of a WWII vet and the husband of a woman who’s family has such a direct connection to the most famous shot that Joe Rosenthal ever took, I think the passing of Joe Rosenthal deserved some mention...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:03 PM 0 comments

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