Boise
Idaho
windsurfing
Photography
Politics
Religion
Economics
3.July 2009
Bid to suck eastern Washington dry(er)
From the "what was he thinking?" department comes
this report, via Ridenbaugh Press of Easterday Ranches' bid to
double the size of its industrial meat operation in eastern Washington,
and to drill out most of a million gallons a day to do it. The potential
enabler was the state Attorney General in 2005, with a
grammatical analysis that ignores the larger context, and the laws
of physics. A statute that was intended to allow "small withdrawals"
(the statute mentions 5,000 gal/day, and half-acre lawns and
gardens) for specific purposes was magically expanded to allow what
could be a 600,000 gallons / day extraction.
A group of local farmers, the Sierra Club and EarthJustice want a
Court to decide the question.
"After over 100 years of conservative farming on some of the driest land
in Washington, our lives and livelihoods are in jeopardy from this huge
industrial feedlot," said Scott Collin, a dryland wheat farmer living
and farming within sight of the planned cattle operation. "The state of
Washington is inclined to twist the law to allow the project to proceed,
so we have no choice but to act in order to protect our families, our
livelihood and our way of life."
2.July 2009
It came from Wasilla
Todd Purdum's piece in Vanity Fair is a fascinating
post-mortem of last year's fireworks that were Sarah Palin. Purdum puts
together sentences like this one, encapsulating the central mystery of
last year's campaign:
"Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest
survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of
life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and
an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have
picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed
job all but disqualified him for his?"
And how nice that there's a world wide web so that Fox News can
respond to Vanity Fair and a conservative newspaper blogger can
pick it up and point us to the original.
"(S)he has the good fortune to have traction within a political party
that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often
demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding
that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the
moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not
burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide
that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any
more than Rush Limbaugh does."
Happy Fourth!
I've seen stuff on Flikr from time to time (and even set up an account
once upon a time? Not sure), but hadn't seen a presentation that was as
simple and featuring big, beautiful photos such as this one:
Happy 4th of July from the Idaho Democratic Party, pictures from
Julie Fanselow's recent vacation to New York City, Washington and
Philadelphia.
I was happily reminded of our own trip to the Capital,
five years ago,
and with Lady Liberty, the trip to New York in the pre-blogging era.
Regressives rally for the 4th
Organizers say
they want to gather to oppose the "progressive movement sweeping our
country."
Things that go boom in the night
and then start fires, coming your way. Our lovely foothills were
especially green this year with a wet June. Snap your fingers and they
are brown friends, and ready to burn.
Mike Butts says
Bah, humbug and I'm with him. You need one or two good professional
shows per year, and let's have individual finger-shortening attempts to
follow on the same night, if they must. We'll sleep it out in the
bunker.
Let's wipe out goathead
It's one of the
weeds
designated noxious in Idaho (and no doubt other states), and
a special enemy of bicyclists: Tribulus terrestris, also
known as puncturevine.
This spring a group of cyclists are fighting back, armed with
hoes, weeders, and leather gloves. The Goathead Avengers are meeting
every Thursday to wet their whistles at 6 and then go out at 7 to fight
the vine. Join them today at Table Rock Brewery, on Capitol Boulevard,
across from Julia Davis Park. The more the merrier!
1.July 2009
Formerly known as Dominion Day
It's Canada Day now, they
tell me, and
11
of their funny ex-pats tell us what they miss about their
native land, from Coffee Crisps to thousands of fugitive logs.
Quote of the day: supernatural trees
Frederick Hazeem, owner/operator of Fredi The Tree Guy, "explaining" how
that big sycamore he was cutting down
ended up on top
of the house:
"Trees aren't like bridges. They don't follow the rules of science."
What a world
Olivia Judson is back from sabbatical and writing for
The Wild Side again, to the delight of her regular readers.
Yesterday's column is about vibro-acoustic communication in ants, and
oddly enough was the second time in my life, and today, that I'd read
about stridulatory organs. The first was in a scientific paper
that was cited in the comments of
the bark beetle hysteria piece I mentioned yesterday:
Insects, Trees, and Climate: The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation
and Entomogenic Climate Change. It's more exciting than the tabloids
in its own way, with tales of "group living, coordination of mass
attack, the necessity for mass infestation to effectively counter host
defenses, signaling to reduce intraspecific competition, and the
collective occupation of nuptial chambers by polygamous species," along
with "mysteries and micro-ecological dynamics" of many species of
beetles, mites, fungi and trees.
30.June 2009
Government by the people
Keith Allred has a
remembrance of
the Founders for the 4th of July, and a promo for his
organization, The Common Interest. (I'm one of the 1,439 and counting
members.)
"We are a group of common Idaho citizens—Republicans, Democrats,
and Independents. We're motivated by a concern that the excessive
influence of partisan and special interest politics has made it
difficult for common citizens to penetrate through the spin to get
honest, substantive information about the issues that we care
about."
Beetle hysteria again
George Wuerthner,
on NewWest, provides a detailed explanation for why we don't have to
cut down our forests to save them from bark beetles (to oversimplify
the hysterical position, slightly).
"(W)e need a paradigm shift in our response to bark beetles. We cannot
significantly influence large scale ecological processes like bark
beetles and wildfire. Rather we must adapt ourselves and communities to
learn to live with them. If climate change is ultimately the reason for
changing tree vulnerability to beetles, than we should deal with
reducing human sources of green house gases."
Welcome to the Senate, Mr. Franken
The
Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he beat Norm Coleman
in the election they had not quite 8 months ago.
A brand new Library!
The one and only one library built in the City of Boise before this year
was
the Carnegie Library, opened 104 years ago this month. In 1973, the
economic choice for expansion was to renovate an old warehouse on
Capitol Boulevard, and a couple other make-do branches have come along
since.
But today, June 30, 2009, the city opened a new library for the new
millennium, a fabulous facility that our good fortune has placed a
5-minute walk from our front door:
The Library! at Cole & Ustick. Among other lovely features,
it was designed to meet gold
LEED
certification, with lots of daylight, efficient use of energy and water,
constructed of recycled and local materials and with smart
landscaping suited to our dry climate.
Needless to say, we were there to celebrate the opening, along with a
couple hundred of our friends and neighbors, members of the Library
Board, most of the City Council, and the Mayor. This was not a
kick-the-tires and run crowd, either: a good proportion of the visitors
were ready to use this Library! The 50 computer terminals, the
multimedia "Study Room," the "Hearth," the checkout desk and even the
book returns were going full steam in the very first hour.
Update:
The branch supervisor reported that
3,600
people had visited the new library before noon.
Just to clarify what we're doing
Nampa Classical Academy
officials responded to the controversy stirred by the news reports
of their plans to use a religious text (a.k.a. "the" religious text) in
the classroom.
The Idaho Public Charter School Commission was nice enough to forward
a copy of the press release to me in response to the email I sent them
yesterday. The NCA is now talking about "religious documents in the
classroom," and supporting their planned use to provide "clearer or more
complete context regarding the impact that the document itself has had
on a given society or civilization," and "when the literary value of
such documents adds value to a given lesson or topic in our literature
classes."
"The documents will at no time be used to establish what is true or what
is not true.... No religious document will be used in a sectarian
manner in an effort to convert or expose any student to a specific
religious viewpoint....
"At no time will the document be studied for the sake of the document
itself but rather for how that document was involved in a particular
society or culture. The study of any religious document will be done so
in accordance with all state and federal laws."
Flew the coop
It's harder than it looks, apparently, as one of the three chicks had a
crash landing in an early attempt at flying. The Peregrine Fund has
a page for the Falcon Cam (the video doesn't work for me, though) with a
bird blog:
Monday, 29 June: All three chicks are flying around downtown
from rooftop to rooftop, closely monitored by volunteer observers. The
adult birds are nearby. On Sunday, Fish and Game biologist Bruce Haak
returned the male (who landed in the street Friday) to the nest box and
placed a pan of water on the roof to be sure the birds have a water
source during this hot weather. After returning to his car, Bruce looked
up just as the third chick took her first flight about 9:45 a.m. Sunday
morning.
29.June 2009
It didn't come up
It looks like Chuck Sheldon is going to get his wish in a little way,
through Nampa Classical Academy's program, "teaching" the Bible
"for its literary and historic qualities." Literary or cultural, ok, but
historic?
The founder insists "we are not a religious school," and I guess we'll
see about that. The folks behind it do seem to be familiar with the
story of the Trojan Horse however, because way down at the end of
the Associated Press
story that the Idaho Press-Tribune and the Statesman
picked up, we read that
Bill Goesling, chairman of the Idaho Public Charter School Commission,
said the Bible wasn't discussed when Nampa Classical Academy was
approved last year. The school drafted a 280-page charter outlining its
goals and overall philosophy, a document that does not mention the Bible
or religion.
“I don't remember it coming up. Had it been known, I think we
would have spent a little bit more time on it,” Goesling said.
Ya think?
Founder Isaac Moffett goes on to surmise that the idea the school is
religious "stems from the core values the school has adopted. Those
values, he said, include character, charity, civility, destiny,
discipline, excellence, industry, integrity, service, loyalty,
originality and patriotism."
I always liked those
Highlights puzzles. Which one
of those core values is not like the other ones? Could it be...
destiny? I'm guessing that didn't come up in the
discussion with Bill Goesling either, but I'd love to hear just what Mr.
Moffett thinks "destiny" has to do with the rest of those fine
values.
Searching
the NCA site with Google,
I find one mention of the Bible:
"Is it any wonder that modern education, sponsored by the government,
with attendance there made compulsory by law, shuns large blocks of time
devoted to the Bible, Greek, Latin, Logic, and Rhetoric? That would
produce free men, thinkers; and, as Richard Mitchell points out, 'the
free are quirky'--hard to control. Why do you think our modern system of
schooling is modeled after Prussia and not after colonial America?"
Their listing of their "core values" is on the
Mission page,
with their "definition" of destiny:
"a specific purpose for which one is set apart; something for which a
person is destined"
Seems a little confused to me, are we destined (and circular, by
the way), or are we free?
I smell a rat.
The ultimate punch line
If you're in the newspaper business, perhaps those letters to the editor
ending with "I'm canceling my subscription!" aren't as funny as they
used to be, but for the everyday readers, there is an element of comedy.
(I guess the writer has to get a copy of their published missive from a
friend?) Ok, whatever, what is it this time?
For Chandra Mouli,
the
last straw was the "extremely offensive and disgusting" article by
Richard Farrell that ran on Father's Day,
"The power and madness of my father's love," (originally
published in the Los Angeles Times under the headline
My dad saved me, and I killed him).
She was "glad" that she saw the article before her kids did. "I cannot
imagine what my 7-year-old would have thought if he had read this
article," she wrote.
"I find it a huge burden to pre-screen what my kids read in the papers
daily," she continued, and ended with a note of thanks that the editors
had made her decision "far easier."
(I trust they don't have a television in their house.)
Naturally, my curiosity about the article was piqued, and as I
re-enacted Mouli's high dudgeon for Jeanette's benefit, she said
"oh yeah, that was a powerful piece... but not something a
7-year-old would read."
As Farrell wrote, the story, like life, is complicated. If you're
strong enough to want more than a Hallmark sentiment for Father's Day,
and have viewer's discretion (and are more than 7 years old), give it a
try. Please don't cancel your subscription over it, though.
The temptation made him do it
Is it my imagination, or is it the case that when a Democrat goes
astray, it's a personal failing, and when a Republican splashes into the
tabloid section, it's a larger lesson? I just about spewed the morning
coffee when I read the lede of
Cal Thomas' column excusing Mark Sanford's fall, because "it could
happen to any of us."
It could happen?
A sunny day could happen, or you could run over a nail and
happen to get a flat tire, but in order to fall into temptation
and start an affair with someone in another country, I think one has to
take some specific actions to initiate matters.
"Any man who claims never to have had thoughts of straying is a liar.
Any man who has sought the help of God and other men in helping him to
honor his marriage promises to his wife and children is a hero,
especially in today's morally exhausted culture."
And those of us who muddle along with the help of God and other men, and
who act with a free will rather than having things "happen" to us, I
guess we inhabit a different universe than Mr. Thomas.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
Home
Weblog
Useful
Sporting
Sailing
Friendly
Site map
Fine Print
Friday, 03-Jul-2009 12:02:43 MDT
http://www.fortboise.org/blog/index.html
