The Speed of Life

One doesn't post as much when there's so much living to do.  Of course, there's a danger in having a life without reflection.  However, as much as I value the act of writing and reflecting on my experiences, I value the act of having them even greater.  Hence, there hasn't been as much posting lately--even absent the rising flood of academic papers that accompany my life for nine months of the year.

Everything is going rather smoothly in the desert.  The clinic has been steadily improving its intake numbers.  I'm continually amazed at how the Doctor comes home with financial reports that meet our expectations, yet when I ask her what the next day looks like, she invariably says, "slow, not many people."  What this suggests is either that she is lying to me or that our business model is working.  Assuming that the Doctor isn't just toying with me, our notion that people will pay for quality care seems to be justified.  Strong per capita spending indicates that we are attracting people willing to give their cats good medicine.

The above paragraph is also an indication of how split my personality has become.  For brief moments in the morning and after SkyGirl has gone to sleep, I plunge deep into contemporary literature, expository pedagogy, and passionate creative work.  Then SkyGirl wakes up, the Doctor goes into work, and I start contemplating spread sheets, ROI's, marketing strategies, and management of employees.  Strangely, I'm not disheartened by this.  I find that I really enjoy working with the accounting software--although this may be largely due to my responsibilities as the guy who tallies up the deposits.  I get to see the money add up.  

I'm also the de facto tech support for the clinic, which allows me to play around with the road not taken.  Early on in my graduate career, I toyed with the idea of dropping out to become some sort of computer support person.  I did that as part of a graduate assistantship and found that not only was I good at it, I really liked working with the systems.  Back then, my job of keeping the English department servers and computers running smoothly felt like one big puzzle.  I liked the challenge of finding ways to make one machine talk to another, figure out how one professor managed to reconfigure a computer so that it only wrote Chinese characters, finely tune the balance of caffeinated and de-caffeinated coffee.  

Now I'm back doing that as well.  Yesterday, I installed the upgrade on the ProImage digital x-ray software, reconfigured our Windows XP that runs as a virtual machine on a MacBook, and then transferred all the digital radiographs from one database to another.  And it was fun (except for SkyGirl constantly drawing me away from the computer to stop her from torturing cats).  My favorite moment was figuring out how to create an automated back-up of the database that linked Automater with iCal and our veterinary practice management software so that only thing the Doctor has to do is walk in the door and swap out portable hard drives.  That was a good day.

Welcome To Red State Update with Jackie Broyles and Dunlap

Welcome To Red State Update with Jackie Broyles and Dunlap

Press Briefing by Tony Snow

Press Briefing by Tony Snow:

Reading the Presidential press briefings are always enlightening to see how the various Bush spokespeople can continually contradict themselves and still maintain that they are speaking forthrightly and honestly. Below, I'm reprinting just one aspect of today's response to Bush pardoning Libby. What strikes me as amazing is that Snow repeatedly insists that the President deliberated extensively in deciding the merits of Libby's punishment and personally decided that the punishment was excessive. Yet when pressed as to the reasons, Snow reverses course and claims that the President has faith in the jury system and doesn't have extensive knowledge of what the jury saw as evidence and from witnesses.

• "MR. SNOW: The President has made it clear that, again, he respects the importance of having a jury system and respecting that jury system, where having listened over a long trial to the facts of the case, a jury of his peers found Scooter Libby guilty of perjury.
• Q So he doesn't agree that it's a non-crime, as the mayor said?
• MR. SNOW: Again, I'm not going to try to get into parsing all the particulars. The President is not trying to serve as a fact witness in this case, or even one who is trying to analyze the virtues or defects of the case that were presented to the court. What he does know is that a jury reached this verdict. And he is intent on honoring --
• Q But doesn't he have to decide that in order to exercise that constitutional authority, just in his own mind to have a view of whether a crime was committed or not?
• MR. SNOW: Again, I think what he does is, he understands that he's been convicted, and that to him is sufficient.
• Q So he accepts a crime was committed?
• MR. SNOW: He accepts that the jury has rendered a verdict and found him guilty of a crime and, therefore, punished him for it."

I'm not calling into question the legal right of the President to commute the sentence (although there is a prohibition on the president pardoning in the case of impeachment, that is, he cannot pardon his own crimes), but with Libby operating in such rarefied circles, the President granting leniency suggests (pretty much confirms) that the rule of law does not apply to senior members of the Bush administration. Rather, they operate under an ethic of ends justifying means. They continually disregard laws applicable to the rest of the country: Dick Cheney refuses to comply with an executive order for members of the executive branch under the ludicrous notion that he is not in the executive branch; the President repeatedly issues signing statements on bills that indicate he is not obliged to follow these particular laws; the Justice department (a misnomer these days) can't seem to find anyone who was actually responsible for the dismissal of attorneys, in this case no one is above the law because apparently no one actually did anything; the dismissal of habeus corpus, the white-out of the Geneva convention, etc.

Bush Pardons Libby

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

Again, the taste of bile flavors my lunch.