The wolf will eat my goat

From the always excellent xkcd.

It seems like most problems in life are variations of this riddle.

North Korean Nukes

I was just reading the always great 'Atlas Shrugs' blog, when the juxtaposition
of korean nukes and color photos of hitler hit me.

It's good that we live in a modern world where dictators post their plans
on their website. Before world war 2, if you wanted to know hitler's plans
you had to listen to his speeches, and even though I don't speak german, they
don't sound like pleasant speeches to listen to.

Now North Korea has litoff a working nuke, and it is easy to see what they want
by reading their website. Just go their webpage and click on the "reunification"
link.

Only few people in the world know that Korea is divided by a big concrete wall in the Parallel 38 that was built by the United States of America when the Korean War finished.This wall is hundreds of times bigger than the one that existed in Germany and is separating the Korean families, brothers, parents... the nation is divided because the U.S.A. is dominating the southern part and keeps an army of more than 40.000 soldiers to avoid the union of the Korean people.

Korea is an independent and sovereign state, but the South is still controlled by the imperialist interests and the U.S. troops .If any South Korean citizen tries to visit North Korea crossing the big concrete wall, he'll be killed by the american soldiers. The 'Security Law' in South Korea forbides to any South Korean citizen to talk or read about the North or else he'll be punished with jail or even death penalty.

'To unify the divided country in this moment is the supreme national task of all the Korean people, and we cannot wait just one moment to achieve it'

In hitler's speech I linked above he doesn't specifically say he'll conquer
europe and kill all the jews, but he does say he'll bring all 10 million germans
back into the country, and for foreign countries not to worry about what
happens to german nationals within germany. Ok, so he wasn't so explicit
as NK is today, but I'm sure if hitler had had a webpage he would have had
some killer links.

The Sith lord speaks

Ace links and excerpts a fantastic speech by Dick Cheney brings
back memories of when he was secretary of defense, and his titanium
rimmed glasses would flash in the camera light as he laid out plan
versus results.

I think the country would have been much better off if he had been
the republican nominee.

here's the high points:

So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions – and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event – coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come.

....

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

...

In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.” Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.

....

If the bush administration had spoken like this to defeat each defamation
as it happened (bush lied! plastic turkey! mission accomplished!
abu grahib!) then I don't think obama would be president.

Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean

So much of what is said by people on the left is pure B.S. to get elected,
to get power over someone else, and they never get called on it. Mark
Steyn expresses it like this:

MS: Well, I would say that they would look on it this way, that if you were to make the comparison with the Miss USA gay marriage flap, that in this instance, not to get too lurid, Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean, and Nancy Pelosi is Barack Obama. In other words, Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama both have exactly the same position on gay marriage, but the left knows that Barack Obama doesn’t mean it, so they don’t mind. He’s just doing what was politically necessary, politically expedient.

That explains so much of what the people on the left say and do. There is just a thin
film of true nutjobs that really believe all the leftist positions (AGW, political correctness,
feminism, socialism/communism, etc), then there are those people that just pick and choose
those positions to be used as clubs to beat up opponents. So you have someone like
Andrew Sullivan who is all about gay rights and feminism, yet is relentless in his attacks
on governor Palin

Or here he is trying to rationalize Obama's positions over the past month:

With Gates and Huntsman and Petraeus and McChrystal, Obama is coopting the best of the Bush legacy, while separating it from the callow cynicism of the Cheney-Rove-Kristol axis.

One thing I like about Dick Cheney is that if he is a dark sith lord of evil, he is
a very consistent sith lord of evil. He may be right or wrong, but his actions and words
agree with his beliefs and he's always acted for the best interest of the US. Whether those
actions resulted in the best outcome we'll never know without sending Obama back in time
like the terminator movies ("I'm Barry Obama, and I've been sent from the future to
stop the evil bush-cheney from being elected, come with me if you want to win the election"
and "yes we can stop the evil robot monster")

Several times in the past I've tried to explain how the leftosphere looks to me, and I'm
never very good at it because I don't have the time or the writing ability I had when I
was younger, but here goes one more time:

Most people on the left can be sorted into serious and non-serious people and true believers
and non true believers. (a 2x2 matrix) Non-serious true believers are easily picked out by wanting to nullify events that happened in the past, so that they demonstrated trying to get bush out of office because they said he didn't legally win the election.

Thankfully, we didn't see many serious true believers, because there was no armed revolt during the bush years, if they really believed bush-cheney were evil mass murderers, the only moral option would have been clear, and it wouldn't have been writing plays fantasizing about murdering the president or moving to Canada.

Non-serious non true-believers are exemplified by filmmakers such as Micheal Moore,
who will say and do anything to make money. If you are an anti-capitalist then you should
make a movie and give it away for free, not try and make millions.

The last square on the grid is filled by most politicians, and if Obama continues on his current
path he'll be a serious, non-true believer that will let him continue policies that will keep
the USA safe. If he flops to a serious true believer then we're truly screwed (think Jimmy
Carter)

Back to bucharest

I'm on my way to romania this week and I'm on wifi in prague
waiting patiently for my czech airlines flight. It's a pretty nice airport here, with
wifi for 12 euros for 3 hours and most importantly abundant power points, nearly
one on every column. I'm busily catching up on all the news I missed last week
when we went to morocco for several days in rabat and a day in marrakech.
[some girls on roller blades just passed down the concorse, the only way to get
around in this massive airport]

The news is the same, obama is a twit, swine flu is everywhere but nowhere
(they are still counting cases in 10s and 20s and deaths in ones or twos
thank goodness) if it was going to get really bad I'd expect cases to be nearly
uncountable by this point, maybe we dodged a bullet. The press is still crowing
what a fantastic job obama is doing, one idiot in the times herald is saying that
obama's mellow foreign policy is working. I guess someone never paid attention
to the way the islamofacists think; strong horse or weak horse. there is no mellow
horse option.

I was reading the voice in my head (very circular blog name, tvimh says
"weatherstripping!") and one jerkwad commenter complained about insults
to the one's basketball skillz and presidential skillz by commenter chicago:

you do the fucking job then chicago. how about everyone who didn't run for president and get elected shut the fuck up. if you can do it better or have any tips that won't make you look like a sore asshole, please feel free to run for government office or at least post your ideas - america is waiting.

here are my ideas:
- lower taxes especially on businesses that hire people in the usa
- make it easier to start businesses, less regulation
- fasttrack the construction of100 nuclear power plants
- import tax on oil to keep the price above $50/bbl
- import tax on natural gas to keep the price above $3/MM ft3


back to travel blogging...
It's kind of sucky that I'll probably have to go to the rig for a few days. I've gained
enough weight this year eating pizza, gnocchi and piadina that the one pair of coveralls
i could find barely fit, they fit more like a 5 pounds of shit in a 3 pound bag kind of fit