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life pictures

Saffron and Elli…ot

Not long after Savannah left this morning for the Utah Classic ballroom competition Mariah called me into their room.

“Dad come look, you’ve got to see this.”

While we purchased two female dwarf hamsters it turns out that Ellie is actually Elliot.

I’m hopeful that first-time-mother Saffron doesn’t get too worried to care for her babies. Two is an awfully small litter so I’m a bit concerned that things might not be alright but I’m hopeful that it will all work out – and then we’ll have to decide how to handle mixed genders.

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National pictures

Confusing the Point

Edward Snowden
Image by: DonkeyHotey

This may be the most obtuse argument I’ve read regarding Edward Snowden. I don’t want to be too hard on Jay Evensen but the logic he uses here is terrible. A conspiracy theorist could come up with many sinister motives for such a poor argument against Snowden but I’m sure it’s something much more mundane like trying to meet a publishing deadline.

Let’s break it down.

First we have an attempt to discredit Snowden based on his connection with Russia.

{Snowden} chose exile {in Russia} because he faces charges of espionage in the United States for revealing things he felt were so egregious he no longer could keep quiet about them. And yet neither he nor his friend, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, seem concerned enough about the blatant abuses in Russia or other countries to dig deeper and expose more.

But it’s no longer convincing, or even noble, to claim a sort of relativistic neutrality while hiding in Russia.

There are two parts to this. The first is that Snowden had a choice of where he took exile. This argument requires that we ignore the fact that while Snowden chose exile because of the charges of espionage in the U.S. he was unable to fly to any of the other locations that offered him exile. Russia was functionally his only option. The second is that Snowden should be exposing Russian digital espionage. This argument relies on ignoring the fact that Snowden’s revelations about the NSA are not based on some super hacker skill on Snowden’s part. Snowden’s information was based on him holding a position of privileged access within the NSA which he would never have within Russian intelligence.

Then we have an effort to defend the NSA by saying it does necessary work.

The U.S. government spies on people. We get it. The NSA is a huge agency with the resources to build a profile on just about anybody it chooses. We get that, too.

But why does the NSA do it? Could there be noble reasons, even if the methods aren’t the best?

Does Snowden care at all about the security of the nation he fled? Does he think the NSA should stop spying altogether, or can he imagine a reason why a spy agency might be important in a dangerous world? What would he consider proper spying?

Again this comes in two parts. The questions for Snowden can’t be asked sincerely unless you have only listened to the non-Snowden side of the story. He has been very clear that he recognizes the necessity of espionage activities and that the reasons behind his actions were the systemic abuses whereby the agency overstepped their constitutional authority (which someone might argue is occasionally necessary) and hid their actions not only from the American public at large (which is certainly necessary to some degree where espionage is concerned) but also from the very congressional committees with oversight over their actions (which is a red flag of the first order in all cases).

Using “Could there be noble reasons, even if the methods aren’t the best?” as an argument here would be like saying of the John Swallow case that raising money is necessary to run a campaign so even if he got money from payday lenders it really shouldn’t be a big deal. That argument completely misses the point of the outrage which isn’t that Swallow got money from payday lenders and that the NSA was spying. The reason for people to be upset in both cases is the way John Swallow and the NSA both went to great lengths to hide their activities from the very people they were supposed to be working for and the organizations that were authorized to provide oversight for their operations.

It occurred to me as I reviewed the article that the point Mr. Evensen wanted to make was that Russia was a greater threat to liberty than the NSA. If so, this was not the way to try making that argument.

Categories
life pictures

My First Turkey

I just finished cooking my first turkey and I just had to share:

Freshly cooked turkey

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life pictures

Welcome Noah

After weeks of Laura feeling like she was ready to be done with this pregnancy (despite the fact that we hoped it would last a little longer to get a few more things done around the house) we got the news on Tuesday that the midwife was concerned that the baby was breech. She had Laura go to the hospital to have the baby turned on Wednesday and said that if the baby was breech again for the visit next week she would want us to turn the baby again and induce labor. We spent a couple of days expecting to enter next week with the prospect of inducing labor – someone had other ideas.

Laura was having contractions off and on for much of Friday. After a Thanksgiving dinner with my side of the family we came home and Laura had concluded that labor was imminent. She planned to go to bed when we got home (at 5:00 pm) so that she could be rested. She took a sleeping pill and laid down – not five minutes later her water broke.

The labor was exciting based on the fact that she had a sleeping pill encouraging her body to postpone labor counteracted by Pitocin in her IV. To make matters more fun, as we neared the crowning the midwife discovered that the baby was oriented oddly again – face first. At 9:11 a swollen and bruised face emerged – just as the midwife had forewarned us when she discovered the orientation – and as I looked to finally identify the gender we had not previously determined I told Laura that “we have a Noah.”

Up to that point we had decided that I would choose the middle name if we had a boy but I had not yet settled on one. I soon knew what name to use – Noah Thomas Miller.

At 6 lbs. 8oz. and 20″ long he’s a healthy and happy little man.

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life pictures

Revealing Personalities

It’s always interesting to me to see the little ways that the kids display their unique personalities. Recently I noticed them coming through on Tap Fish, a game I have on my iPod. The game is a virtual aquarium and I allowed each of the kids to have their own tank. Because I don’t allow them to play the game anytime they want, and because the fish in the tanks will dies if neglected for too long (two full days according to the documentation), I make a habit of going in every day to feed their fish, just in case they won’t get an opportunity soon. Other than my basic maintenance I don’t do anything with the kids’ tanks, they each have complete control of what they put in the tank in the way of fish and tank decorations.

At first I limited what they could buy so that no one child would use up all the virtual money at the expense of the others but once I built up a sizable reserve of coins I dropped that restriction and it has been interesting to see each tank take on it’s own character according to the person who owned it.

Please note that I would not presume to read much into looking at the tanks if I did not get to see the other aspects of each child’s life as well.

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life pictures

A Look at the Future

It’s always fun for me to write welcome posts when we are expecting a new arrival. We’ve done this enough times now that as we prepare for number six there would seem to be nothing new to say. That might explain why we have decided not to find out in advance whether this will be a boy or whether we have a girl coming our way.

When we went for the ultrasound the doctor captured a cool image of baby’s arms crossed in front of it’s face as if rubbing it’s eyes while waking up from a nap.

That last sentence should have been awkward enough to prove why almost everyone these days chooses to find out the gender of their coming baby in advance. I have suggested that we use male pronouns in odd months and female pronouns in even months when talking about baby but I don’t know if we’ll actually do that. The only thing we know for sure is that if this is a boy he will be named Noah and if this is a girl we have not yet settled on one name.

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life pictures

Welcome to Katherine

I got the exciting news that I am a new uncle again as my brother and his wife had their new baby girl this morning. I expect she’s beautiful but I haven’t seen any pictures yet. On the other hand, I thought it was very funny to see the baby statistics for Katherine right above a tax advice disclaimer – as pictured above.

Congratulations to Katherine … and Mom and Dad … and Jack (big brother) and Mariann (big sister).

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Best Calendar for 2010

On Christmas day there was one gift under the tree that neither Laura nor I knew about. Savannah had made a wonderful calendar for our family for 2010. I just had to share each of the months – it really warmed our hearts to see the work that she had put into this.

January

February

March

April
In case you can’t tell, that shell of the egg opens and closes to reveal the picture.

May

June

July

August

September

October

Things she is thankful for: Mom and Dad, Alyssa, Mariah, Isaac, and Bell (not sure of the reference there)
Things she is thankful for: Mom and Dad, Alyssa, Mariah, Isaac, and Bell (not sure of the reference there)

December

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life pictures

Family Pictures

When Enoch was born I promised to post a family picture. Things were busy enough that since we were not allowed to take the kids to visit in the hospital we never got around to taking a family picture until three weeks later when we had already scheduled family pictures of our extended family (David’s family) including individual sittings for each of the families in the group. Now it has taken another three and a half weeks to finally get the picture scanned in and posted here.

So without further ado, here is the whole family:

Seven of Us

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life pictures

Welcome Enoch

Almost 3 years to the day after his older brother arrived we got a new arrival today. Stats and story follow.
Name: Enoch Andrew Miller
Arrived: 11:15 am 11/2/2009
Weight: 7 lbs. 5 oz.
Length: 20 1/2 inches

Enoch Miller
Enoch Miller

We had been expecting him for weeks since his two older siblings each came three weeks early – never again. My new motto is “be ready a month early and don’t plan on anything before the due date.” Enoch was not very late as he was due the last week of October, but he held on long enough to make it into November – boy month in our house since Dad, Isaac, and now Enoch all have November birthdays. Unfortunately siblings (under 14) can’t come to the hospital to visit so we can’t get a great little family picture like we had when Isaac was born. We’ll post the best we can get after Enoch gets home.