<$BlogRSDURL$>

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

Friday, August 10, 2007

Saying Goodbye To A Buddy 

...I blog to provide an emotional release for myself. I never dreamed that I would ever become the Great Orange Monster or a Powder Blue Atriot Big-Time First String Blogger, although I do hold the record for driving Lisa English's blog Ruminate This from top one hundred status to single-celled organism status in a remarkable short period timeframe. That singular achievement may - in ways that I don't wish to contemplate right now - tell all about the direction of my blogging career...

Tonight, however, is one of those nights that defines why I started blogging...it's all about the emotional release. Seven and a half years ago I moved to my current office (we call it a "duty station" in the Federal borg) and took up office residency with one of the best groups of employees that any ol' grunt could hope to encounter. I've been generally out of the office for the last week or so, during which time the one person with whom I've most closely worked and most closely shared jokes and most closely shared the tribulations of federal life grew increasingly ill...

I returned to the office late this afternoon to find out that this one person with whom I have had a close friendship and working relationship had been transported by EMT personnel to a local wide spot in the road to be flown by medical helicopter to St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon. He died a short time after arrival...

This evening has been difficult for a variety of reasons that I won't be going into here. "Change" is the rule in my business, but "change" is usually defined by the common parameters that everybody normally understands. Death isn't "change" under these circumstances, and it's a hard thing to deal with every time it happens in a career field where it isn't an occupational risk. For me, the bottom line is that I will never again engage in a rousing debate over whether it's "Morning" or "Good Morning"; there won't be specific discussions about NASCAR Nextel Cup races or the most recent NFL game...but even more there won't be that presence to relate to...

The worst part about these sorts of circumstances is that there is a dark lack of closure for those of us left behind. Put quite simply, we never had the chance to say 'goodbye'. Robed as we can be in a happy, functional work setting where nothing bad ever happens, we are robbed of the opportunity to say that one last time how much we valued the personal and professional relationship that we had with the person that has left us....

Goodbye, Buddy. I'm sorry that all my time out in the woods the last couple of weeks kept me from being around the office to wave the red flag that something might be seriously wrong with you. I'm sorry that we weren't able to figure it all out soon enough to save you. I'm most sorry...and really, really sorry... that I never got a chance to say something that sounded like goodbye. After all, you and I were going to be back at work on Monday...

Rest in Peace, Buddy...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:44 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Watching It Live Again 

...one warm spring afternoon in 1974, the guy in the next dorm room over had a baseball game on his little TV. I wandered in just a bit before Hank Aaron came up to bat, and I watched as he punched a pitch out of the park to break Babe Ruth's career home run record...

A few years ago, I was watching a game on TV as Mark McGuire slapped the ball just barely over the wall to record his 62nd home run of the season, breaking another record...

Just a couple of minutes ago, over my shoulder as I was typing my previous post, ESPN broke into "SportsCenter" to show Barry Bonds' current at bat. After 2 called 'balls', a knee-high called 'strike' and a couple of fouled-off pitches, I saw Barry Bonds whack number 756 out of the field of play in San Francisco...

History and the judicial system will decide just exactly how the steroid rumors and Bonds' remarkable physical development influenced this particular night. All I know is that I'm not all that big a fan of Major League Baseball (except for the team from Seattle) and I am more than thrilled that Bonds has achieved this milestone so sports journalism can move on to what is really important: the coming NFL season and the NASCAR Nextel Cup "Race For The Chase".

At least, for this particular sports fan, the long national nightmare is over...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:57 PM 0 comments

Where The Hell Did The Pentagon Buy 110,000 AK-47's? 

...and, more to the point, why did the Pentagon buy 110,000 AK-47's to provide to the Iraqi military? It's not the most important item in the self-serving propaganda/interview that General David Petraeus gave to Faux News Radio. That would be this piece:
"Those units did have advisors, but they did not have the property book officer, they did not have the property book records that we would associate with normal procedures and yet they were units that needed to go into the fight."

Fascinating observation, especially given that most of these Russian-derived weapons were passed out to anybody who even looked like a GWB War on Terra New Democracy Iraqi soldier by - as Gee Dub calls him - 'David' and his gang between June of 2004 and September of 2005. If memory serves correctly, that was a period when the majority of the GWB War on Terra New Democracy Iraqi troops where still in the process of being trained and weren't even close to actually being sent into "the fight". The number of missing weapons would serve as many as 10 infantry divisions, which the Iraqi Army did not have ready to 'go into the fight' in the timeframe during those weapons went missing...

There is still the lingering question as to why AK-47's were provided instead of American M-16's. One would assume that the ubiquituous nature of the AK and the ready availability of that weapon's particular ammunition was the reason, but still...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:18 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Playing For The Base vs. Playing For The Win 

...today’s Republican presidential debate in Iowa should be just about all anybody who’s paying attention needs to draw two clear distinctions between the Democratic and Republican contests...

Point the First: The respective contests show as clearly as can be shown the stark, fundamental, personal difference between the parties, despite all the vague Republican talk about “reaching out” in order to pitch that big tent their more clever strategists have always talked about. Today’s Republican debate included nine middle-aged to elderly white men who all together couldn’t light a charisma fire with gas-soaked kindling and a blowtorch. There was a time a few presidential election cycles ago when the Democratic candidates were called “The Seven Dwarves” because of their pallid lack of differentiation. Now, on the Republican side, there are eight of ‘em and they are the face of the current Republican party: white, self-entitled, socially conservative, Iraq war supporters (except for Ron Paul), and generally self-deluded when it comes to discussion of fiscal issues in the way that the Republican party has become...

The Democratic slate, on the other hand, looks remarkably more like America and only one of the top three candidates has a vaguely passing physical resemblance to any Republican prospect. There are, to be sure, old white guys in the mix (although I must confess that some of these folks aren’t as old as I may have once thought them, but that’s more about me than it is about them), but there is also a woman and an African-American man at the top of the polls and an Hispanic man in the mix. More than that, all up and down the list, from lead-off batter to the last person in the line-up, any one of them is able to throw off more sparks than all of the Republican candidates combined even if you filled all of their pockets tight little conservative pockets with flint. The differential in campaign contributions from sources other than personal weath tells you all you need to know about who is actually energizing voters...

Point B for Bravo The two primary campaigns are preaching to different congregations. Republicans are battling for the favor of the ‘29 percenters’, that dug-in base that still supports George W. Bush and is seen as the fuel to power a return trip to the White House. They oppose abortion and its surrogate embryonic stem cell research, they support the Iraq war and The Surge and whatever continued fighting and dying our troops need to do in a part of the Middle East that had nothing to do with September 11 in 2001, they don’t see any particular reason for the separation of church and state (the specific church may be somewhat in question, however), they believe in tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of fiscal sanity, and the down-trodden and disadvantaged are simply losers who need to buck up and take care of themselves in this otherwise best of all possible worlds. These are generally the issues of what is commonly understood to be the current base, even though some of those views may be far beyond any tradional understanding of the term ‘conservative’...

Democrats - at least the leading contenders to one degree or another - are already into ‘08 campaign mode. Hillary’s talk about the future of American involvement in Iraq and Obama’s recent foray into Pakistan sabre-rattling are plays for the moderate vote, and even John Edwards’ Poverty Tour is an attempt to highlight issues that lots of decent Americans have been willing to support. While there is stiff competition to be the most critical of Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure and set the sternest timetable for the removal of American troops from that meat-grinder, the leading candidates understand, whether rightly or wrongly, that they could be fighting both the Main Stream Media and the Swift-boating minions of the Republican party when time comes for the general election campaign. While the Republican contestants are desperately trying to hold to a Gee Dub fairy tale about Iraq and the GWOT that as many as 70% of Americans do not support, Democrats are trying to demonstrate to a different, larger electorate than ‘the base’ that they ‘get it’ as far as the War on Terra is concerned and that they will be sufficiently tough without engaging in wars that have crass personal motivations. This causes no end of consternation and debate on the left, especially during the recent Chicago progressive netroots come-together, given the fact that both Clinton and Obama are and have been spouting the sorts of things that can really set the progressive netroots off. Some of the Democratic campaign insiders, however, seem to believe that they are actually engaged right now in a fight for votes on the first Tuesday next November rather than for the votes of partisan primary voters seven months from now. Miscalculations may occur and the primary base may well overturn whole wheelbarrows full of carefully crafted plans once the primary orgy begins just after the turn of the year, but the difference between the feel of the primary campaigns is, to say the least, an interesting display of differences...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:41 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?