The story of LilPinkGrl

In 2001, right before 9/11 my oldest and I were getting ready for our high adventure trip to Philmont Scout Reservation. We would don our backpacks and walk around the neighborhood at night trying to prepare ourselves for what lay ahead.

So we had just left the house and while on the street we see this little toy something laying there.

"Hey! it's a little pink girl!" my kid says.

And so LilPinkGrl- as she has became known as - came to live with us.


I noticed from the picture my wife took of her that she had taken some road damage before we saved her, losing her nose to the asphalt. But she is a tuff little girl and after nursing her back to health she has gone on some rather harrowing adventures as a music playing Vah Shir in EverQuest, a Frosty Sorceress in Diablo II, and most recently a Dwarf Shadow Priest on WoW.

It may seem kind of strange for a 50 something adult male to play computer games as a female character named LilPinkGrl. Heck its strange that I game as much as I do period, but there is a reason in this case. LilPink actually represents a real something.

Tonight she is going to go fishing and will hunt down some cheese/wine glass/carrots/mushrooms for the umpteenth time in order to get her a cooks hat. I need to repeat this process for about 35 more days and the stupid hat is all hers!

Hey, you go get a life, I do what I can to make her happy, she's a little sensitive about her looks - that missing nose thing - so she thinks that hat will make her look special.

After 25 years of marriage I know never to argue about these types of things.

Taking One For The Team

Published Saturday, August 02, 2008 www.Theeagle.com

Texas A&M University athletic director Bill Byrne received a $204,000 salary boost and a 21/2-year contract extension Friday. The increase, approved Friday by the Texas A&M System Board of Regents, brings Byrne's salary to $690,000 annually. His contract now extends through Aug. 31, 2013.

Published Friday, July 03, 2009 www.TheEagle.com

Two of the longest-tenured members of the Texas A&M University athletics department lost their jobs Thursday in a budget-cutting move that eliminated 17 positions from the department.

Billy Pickard and Jim Kotch have a combined 73 years of service in the department. They were casualties of what athletics director Bill Byrne called a reduction in force that was required to complete a $4.5 million budget cut. Byrne said in a statement that the athletics department had to eliminate the positions because A&M officials could make only $3.5 million in cuts without reducing personnel."

Later in the same article we find out:

Four years ago, former A&M President Robert Gates and Byrne agreed that the athletics department would receive a $16 million line of credit from university funds for coaches' salaries and new facilities. The deal allowed the department access to the credit for four years, with 10 years to repay the money without interest. The first quarterly payment is due Nov. 30.

OK, so athletics, which everyone says "supports itself" through ticket sales needs to borrow money. That's understandable, but......

The line of credit was revealed last month in a self-critique of former A&M President Elsa Murano. "The athletics department has been operating in a deficit situation for several years," Murano wrote. "

OK, so you have been operating in a deficit for several year, but one year ago you give the man who is at the helm of the red ink spewing ship a $204,000.00 salary boost.

My question to Mr. Byrne, when you stated:

"This difficult decision [Reduction in Force] came after an exhaustive review of the entire program and with great reluctance."

Did you think about giving back your salary boost to save the jobs of your staff?

Call me irrersponsible........

shakes head back and forth.........

"She is a beloved figure in the Republican Party," conservative commentator Pat Buchanan said on MSNBC. "If she's not running for governor and wants the option to run for president, what sense does it make to stay in Alaska? She's saying, in effect, I'm liberating myself."

Any reader to this blog will know I am no fan of Sarah Palin. She is all hat as they say in Texas, and anyone who thinks she would make a better president over other more seasoned and dare I say, stable, candidates proves what is wrong with the Republican party pre Newt. You want a viable female Republican candidate, look at Kay Bailey Hutchison or Carol Browner for starters.

Palin may be leaving politics for good, an understandable decision on her part. For every stupid person who finds her a darling, there is a mean, vindictive person who will attack her kids and family going so low as to make fun of her Down's child. I don't think she was prep'd correctly to start this battle and unfortunately has paid a high price for it. No one deserves to be treated this way.

And yet they still look to the sky........

Palin is celebrity - she is also a loose cannon, unpredictable, and - what has been shown to date - lacking in the wisdom to be a good leader. Prior to elevating her to Republican goddess she may have been able to carve out a legitimate resume. Since all it takes to vote is age and being a citizen, we the people are known to make poor decisions and choices, crave celebrity, and respond to rhetoric over wisdom, this may indeed be Palin's high water mark.

What sense does it make to stay in Alaska? Well Pat, maybe to show guys like me and the world that she has the personal character necessary to lead in times of good and bad. This is the mark of a true leader - the sticktoitness to finish what they start and do the best job they possibly can for the right and just reasons.

With all the foolishness that has followed Palin to this point and now this, for her to remain a beloved figure shows just how clueless those controlling the Republican party are. We the people - despite our stupid behavior - deserve better.

"S" is for Scientist

I have always wanted to call myself a scientist but have hesitated or been reluctant due to what I perceived were the requirements of which I knew I did not met. I cannot recall names of things, including people, no matter how many times I repeat them. Some stick, for example eucalyptus elongates has always stuck with me – and I learned it from a landscape design class I took in high school 35 years ago, and of course sequoia sempervirens, the giant redwood of which I spent a lot of time working on while getting my undergrad in Botany from Humboldt State. But most of the time I struggle with the terms, formulas, and calculations, and so never thought I could really call myself a scientist.

It has only been lately that I realize what makes someone a scientist, and it is not those things. They are helpful and make it easier, but that is not, fundamentally, the requirements for the designation of scientist. It is instead the passionate desire to understand the “why” of something. Not to accept that it “just does”, but to pursue the possible mechanism responsible. That is what makes a scientist - this want to find an answer, the intellectual curiosity and fascination with what happens from the macro to the microscopic.

I have had the privilege, due to the generosity of my in-laws, to make up for my lack of faith in myself by going after my Masters. I settled 30 years ago for a BA, not a BS, in Botany. The lack of that “S” at the end, as silly as it may seem, always bothered me, but it was not until recently that I understood why. I failed myself when I took the easy way to a degree. Without the “S” my degree, my knowledge, my ability to put myself in the same room with my intellectual peers was always cheapened by my full understanding that I took the easy way. It is not the “A” or the “S” that matters, it is that I did not put the time into it, I know that and anyone that looks at me would know that too.

So with little confidence that I could do it, I got up the courage to try. But…..you know that permanent record that they always warned you about when you were young and in school? Well there really is such a thing and they can use it to keep you out. I was not a stellar student in high school or college and my stupid-stinking permanent record will not let me forget that. So to get into Grad School I would need someone to believe in me and give me a chance. That person, through the recommendation of my good friend Annamarie, was Professor KC Donnelly, the head of the EOH department at the Texas A&M HSC - School of Rural Public Health.

Dr. Donnelly passed away this Wednesday, a victim of esophageal cancer. He was five years older than me but light years ahead in knowledge and in my opinion the epitome of what a scientist is. I am working to finish my thesis, of which he never got to see my work. I emailed him while he was in the hospital and sent him all my drafts. I have no idea if he got to see it, and it really does not matter, what I wanted him to know is that what I have produced is the culmination of what he provided me an opportunity to achieve. When it is all said and done I will have added that “S” and I will not be able to thank him for that by defending my thesis in front of him and then shaking his hand at graduation.

I will miss having that opportunity and I will miss him. He is what I hope to call myself - what I can now call myself – a scientist.

Like Deja Vu All Over Again

"I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times...." Jimmy Carter 1976


June 29th 2009

Janine Driver, a Washington, D.C.-based body language and deception detection expert, believes he [Mark Sanford] lied when a reporter asked if this was the first time he had been unfaithful.

"He answers the question before it's been asked," said Driver, who spent 15 years with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "Then what does he do? He drops both his eyes and turns his head AWAY? ... That's what's called the cold shoulder. Because we face the core of our body toward people who usually address us."

Sanford told his friend "Cubby" Culbertson he had never strayed before, and he [Culbertson] "absolutely" believes him.

"Some guys are wired such that violating God's design in this area, of women, is a real challenge to them," Culbertson said. "That's not in his DNA. That's why it's such a surprise."

June 30th

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's recent affair wasn't the only time he strayed from his wife, Sanford revealed in an interview with the Associated Press. But, he says, he didn't have sex with the other women, who he met while on trips abroad.

"There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line .... What I would say is that I've never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid [things]? I have. You know you meet someone. You dance with them. You go to a place where you probably shouldn't have gone," Sanford said.

For some reason this all sounds just way too familiar, like deju vu all over again.

January 26, 1998

"But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Bill Clinton said.

Source:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/06/30/sanford_line/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31634044/ns/politics-more_politics/

The truth is...........

Regarding the recent Supreme Court ruling that there is no constitutional right to test biological evidence use at a trial before DNA testing was available.

There are two things at play here, the process and the outcome, and unfortunately both are given equal weight by lawyers and prosecutors. It is not hard to understand why, really when you think about it. What is the outcome - or objective - of a trail – to establish guilt or innocence, which in effect is to establish the truth about a situation. But truth can be elusive, hidden, disguised - which makes the outcome always suspect – is it really a true statement of what took place? Because there is doubt to the truth from the perspective out the person(s) responsible for the outcome, we put into the decision the word “reasonable.”

So what is “reasonable” and how does that even come close to what is the truth? It can’t and therein lies the flaw with the system. We cannot have doubt when we condemn or exonerate a person, it would never lead to closure, so we instead focus on the process that leads to the decision. It is here where the waters turn muddy for the process is least important to the truth. That is the truth is the truth, the process has no bearing on the truth, that is the two are independent of one another.

There are four, and only four possible outcomes from a trial when guilt is assessed.

• You can be found guilty and the truth is you are guilty
• You can be found guilty and the truth is you are not guilty
• You can be found not guilty and the truth is you are guilty
• You can be found not guilty and the truth is you are not guilty

Only two of the four have an outcome that is true. Yet in all four cases, if the process that leads to the outcome was fair, then justice was done. However, in two of the outcomes the truth was not reached. To be found not-guilty when you are guilty might be seen as a failure of the system, however, to be found guilty when you are innocent is a travesty especially when a long jail term or the death penalty is the punishment.

For Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Alaska to legally deny access to DNA evidence that might exonerate a wrongly accused person is upsetting, especially in light of the 240 people who have used it to overturn their convictions is distressing. For the Supreme Court to uphold the right to deny access to this evidence is disappointing. I understand the argument about state’s rights, however, the argument made by Chief Roberts, and the same one I have seen used by prosecutors to deny access to evidence after conviction, is in support of the process at the expense of the individual - that new technology that was not available at trial should not throw fairly won convictions into doubt.

“The dilemma is how to harness DNA’s power to prove innocence without unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice”

In other words it’s the process that must be preserved.

Warning: Doublethink in Play

Don Beavers, a retired Army Intelligence officer, writes at the beginning of his essay (The Eagle 6/12/09):

“The United States of America does not torture prisoners or detainees”

This statement, as well as every statement that contends torture did not take place appears to be predicated on two things:

• There was no intent to kill
• They would not suffer lasting harm

Because these two things were not present during the wateboarding or any other “enhanced interrogation” procedure torture did not take place. There is no debate here on what is and what is not torture. It has been clearly articulated by both the UN as well as under the Geneva Convention.

UN: torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Geneva Conventions: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."

When I hear these arguments - these bold statements of assertion that what did go on did not go on - I immediately think of George Orwell’s “1984”. There is a certain irony at play here, just like by calling it the Ministry of Love, and understanding, while you called it that, what the word “love” meant, and also knowing that torture took place within the Ministry of Love, required simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs - or - what Orwell called “doublethink.”

It is doublethink when Mr. Beavers, Donald Rumsfeld, Eric Holder, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales declare that torture did not take place when they know full well how it is defined. To believe we are a moral nation, to believe we are a nation of laws, to believe we do not torture, and yet knowing we did is a textbook example of doublethink.

…to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.

Mr. Beaver’s ends his essay:

“I did not consider anything I was subjected to [in training] or anything we did to question prisoners to be torture.”

So if waterboarding, which he rates as a “7 or 8” out of 10, is not “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental” or is not a “form of coercion” then what is? To call it anything else ignores the lawful definition and most importantly, ignores the reality of what took place. Mr. Beavers and his ilk know this but will steadfastly adhere to their assertion that torture did not take place.

How could something so despicable and unlawful as torture take place by the US? It could not. So they call it something else - enhanced interrogation, a name that does not mean torture in the same way the windowless Ministry of Love became the place where there is no darkness