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

Friday, May 15, 2009

Mother And Baby Are Doing Fine 

...there has been a fascinating - dare I say it - even gripping little drama going on somewhere down in the basement of the Intertubes over the last 36 days, involving a pair of bald eagles, a nest high in an old fir tree overlooking a lake near the crest of the Oregon Cascades, and the brutal reality of high-mountain spring weather that can make you wonder for just a moment how it is that there are any eagles at all...

A few years ago the Oregon Zoo and several cooperators (including the U.S. Forest Service NatureWatch program) worked to install a live-feed video camera on a bald eagle nest above Odell Lake in the Central Oregon Cascades. The idea was to produce real-time video of an active nest that could be displayed on a set of TV screens installed in an interpretive display in the "Eagle Canyon" portion of a recently constructed exhibit at the zoo called "The Great Northwest". Technological problems plagued the first couple of nesting seasons, and a failed nesting effort (most likely due to incredibly nasty weather during the incubation season last year) denied the opportunity to watch a baby eagle grow up last year (I have a close personal connection to one of the people involved in this effort and - believe me - there was a tremendous amount of sadness when the nest and failed egg were abandoned)...

This spring, however, the featured eagle pair (named in a contest - and I am not kidding - Cascade and Lady Odell) appeared out of the blue, with no prior nest preparation at all (which is somewhat unusual), produced an egg, and began the rather arduous process of trying to hatch it. A small cadre of obsessed eagle-cam watchers has been hanging onto every live feed video moment (the link to paste into a QuickTime viewer "open url" box is http://vbxevents.powerstream.net/003/02411/live1/eagle.mov if you would like to become similarly obsessed) and talking back and forth to each other and posting videos and screen grabs on a good ol' fashioned bulletin board discussion group over the last 36 days. Somewhere around 5:30 pm (PDT) this evening, they were granted the outcome they have been hoping for over the last month or so (I could almost smell the cigar smoke through the monitor)...

Birth Announcement

Cascade and his lovely bride Lady Odell are pleased to announce the arrival of their much anticipated offspring "Baby Odell" sometime over the last 12 hours. "Baby Odell" clocks in at approximately 5 inches long and weighs roughly three ounces. Mother (and father, who spent a pretty good amount of time sitting on the egg himself) and baby are - as of this moment - doing well...

...and visitors to the Oregon Zoo may finally have the opportunity to see what a bunch of hard-working, dedicated people hoped to give them the opportunity to see five years ago...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:45 PM 0 comments

Thursday, May 14, 2009

On The Danger Of Wearing Bow Ties 

...on this, the occasion of my one thousandth effort to type words into a post for my own personal blog (as opposed to my posting efforts at a couple other places over the years), it is time that we visit the dangers that can accrue from being a conservative who for far too long styled around in public with a bow tie. Bow ties are a pernicious yet unrecognized blight on the intellectual capacity of the American public because of the singular way that they deny oxygen-enriched blood to the brain, and the tragic consequences of ignoring that threat are no better demonstrated than by this collection of strange observations by that most famous of bow tie wearers, George F. Will...

I'm too tired and beat up from real life to spend much otherwise better-spent time to actually mess around with all the things that Will brings out in his piece. All I have the energy to say is "what the hell are you talking about?". George has decided to pick this point in our particular construction of American history to declare that Obama's efforts to dig our economy out of the hole that Bushco put us in is, in point of fact, some sort of latter day socialism and representative of a particular and dangerous sort of lawless political corruption...

Think about that for a minute.

After all the issues of torturing people to confess to nonexistent connections between al Quada and Iraq, after the finally fulfilled desire to make us less free as a nation through the passage of various iterations of the Patriot Act, after all the issues surrounding what appears to have been an unsupportable and illegal wiretapping of American citizens, after many hundreds of 'signing statements' that imposed a totally unsupportable concept of an imperial presidency on a country that had no particular history of an executive operating outside of the Constitutional construct; after all this and much, much more, it is only now that George Will has 'problems' with the exercise of executive power that leads him to the strange concluson that the current administration is operating in some strange dangerous space outside the bounds of law...

I blame the ties and, as a scientist (at least insofar as the late and unlamented Gee Dub gang would crank out such labels), I have one simple bit of advice...

Let all of this be a lesson to the fashion conscious: Don't wear bow ties. They cut off brain blood flow, robbing you of any normal sense of right or wrong or what actually is "corruption" or "lawlessness" and may not even seem to be all that much different from waterboarding...apparently...

You've been warned...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:29 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Oh, Please, Lord; Let Me Live Long Enough 

...there is a simple primitive human fascination with watching things crash and burn. Aside from conjuring a sort of strange congratulatory sense of "there, but for the Grace of God, go I...this time", witnessing moments of violent destruction feed some sort of primal understanding about survival, impermanence, and failure. How else to explain the popularity of auto racing, professional wrestling, thousands of people flocking into cold Sunday morning streets to watch a building implosion, or "American Idol". We now can enjoy a new opportunity to indulge in our obsession by watching the train wreck that the Republican party is becoming, and the most recent chance to indulge in this dirty little vice of ours comes from Florida Governor Charlie Crist's announcement that he's going to run for the U.S. Senate...

Yes!1!@@! There will be a bitterly-fought Republican primary challenge over a shot at Mel Martinez's Senate seat, because the relatively popular governor (apparently with the general electorate, at least) doesn't fit the bill for the true believers of that much-to-be-cherished Republican base. This is great stuff, involving potential repudiation of the sitting governor by his famous predecessor, party intrigue, and the specter of party pack animals slashing at each other with glistening bloody fangs over the rapidly diminishing fate of the party. I can only pray that I live long enough to witness a primary fight to the death between a candidate who sufficiently appeals to state-wide voters in Florida to have won the Governor's seat against a guy who represents everything that the Club for Growth, FAUX news, Rush Limbaugh, the wingnut fringe "core", and the fadings edges of the anti-Castro vote simply cannot live without...

OK, so I'm not planning on checking out anytime soon and don't have any reason to expect any such thing, but things do happen (especially when you drive the road I do twice a day to get to work and back home again). Things happen, but I pray that they don't, because this upcoming Republican Senatorial primary campaign is going to be one for the ages, and I don't want to miss it (because of all the craziness that the contest portends) even from the entire otherwise uncaring other side of the country...

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Posted by: Jack K. / 7:24 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Buying Bullets In the Land Of The Wingnut 

...so I took my second-born out today to purchase what - in the state of Orygun - are essentially lottery tickets for special youth hunt deer and elk tags for this fall's hunting season. (Long story short: Orygun offers youth-only hunts in selected state hunting units for 12-17 Y.O.'s who have taken the state hunter safety course and are accompanied by an unarmed person 21 or older. Kid wants to hunt; might as well show him just how much colder and wetter and unsuccessful hunting can be than those TV outdoor shows and video games suggest.)...

There wasn't any problem at all buying his "draws" (the hunting units for which he wanted to compete in the June drawing for hunting tags), but those shelves behind the counter that should be stacked with all manner and caliber of ammunition sat virtually empty with only a couple of boxes of strange calibers like .260 and .280. There weren't even the normal stacks of 500-round boxes of .22LR ammo that we usually rely on for our target practice use (for those who don't do firearms, a 500-round 'brick' of .22 bullets costs about the same as a 20-round box of larger caliber hunting rifle ammo, so the math is pretty easy if you have a penchant for going out to some backwoods rock pit to shoot at pop cans and targets). When asked, the guy behind the counter essentially confirmed that the same thing is going on in my little corner of Wingnutia that is happening across the country: people are hoarding ammunition because they FEAR Obama is going to take away their guns or restrict their access to ammunition...

It was a bad moment. I suddenly found myself being overcome by the ugly sense that I was about to find myself in agreement with the Republic-Fascist party insistence that the public school system has failed our country. How else to explain a complete lack of understanding of either the actual political composition of the Congress of the United States or the actual powers that a president has under the terms of the Constitution and case law...

"Law" is the operative word here. I learned 40 years ago - back in another time when "liberals" had a fierce death-grip on the levers of power - that Congress made laws and the Executive branch - led by the President - carried out those laws. Gun ownership laws are laws and ammunition taxation laws are laws; the only authority the Executive branch has is to promulgate regulations that fulfill the intent of those laws. In fact, the SCOTUS the limits of Executive Orders to do more than that in the 1952 case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer which, while it didn't settle some of the basic issues of federal seizure of private property, did establish that a president cannot either create or nullify Congressional law by Executive Order...

Clearly, somewhere or other that moment went off the rails for a great many of my friends and neighbors, many of whom in my poverty-stricken part of the world - ironically enough - rely on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and a host of other social programs that the Wingnut politicians for whom they usually vote would kill in a heart beat if opportunity and majority were ever to present themselves. And that leads, in a sort of backwards "inverse pyramid" observation, to the first of those issues I raised above: it doesn't take much of a Souper Genyus to take a gander at the composition of the United States Senate and come to a pretty clear understanding of the dim chances that any sort of significant gun control legislation actually has out here in the real world. Given the number of Democratic Senators who are either - depending on your taste in political terminology - 'Blue Dogs' or 'moderates', it's beyond the bounds of reality that any sort of legislation that "takes away gun rights" would even be able to muster a simple majority, much less garner a filibuster-proof margin...

None of all of this even addresses that one simple "Ghost Buster" question that these wing/gun nuts apparently don't have the intellectual capacity to address: if Obama and his Socialist/Fascist/Muslim minions are going to try to take our guns and ammo away from us, "Who Ya Gonna Call"?

The military? Not likely. The whole concept of "lawful order", not to mention both the Posse Comitatus Act and the supposed conservative bent of military personal, would argue against the local National Guard company coming out of its barracks to try to impose some sort of extralegal presidential will on the locals...

The "Black Helicopter/Jack-booted Thug" civilian Federal employee workforce"? Get real, now. While there are about two million Federal civil service employees, the majority of them would probably pose a far greater threat to themselves and their coworkers than to the general population if they were to be issued body armor, firearms, and orders to confiscate The Peoples' Firearms. The totality of Federal civilian personnel that actually have law enforcement and weapons training have enough to do just trying to keep up with their current jobs, much less trying to disarm a population many times their size that has them seriously outgunned in many small towns in terms of simple numbers alone...


OK, OK, I apologize. I know better. Rational thought and logic have no greater value than Monopoly money in Wingnut World, even though the only examples of presidential behavior that have dangerously challenged commonly-understood Constitutional limits over the last four decades have occurred with Republicans in office. Still, the reaction of those around me - and apparently by a whole bunch of folks around the country - is just simply silly, if not half-bright. Dare I say it...this is pure wingnut behavior...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:50 PM 0 comments

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