Snow day

It's snowing pretty hard here today, starting with the small
granules of snow and building up until huge clumps of snow are falling,
looking like someone overturned several thousand baskets of white
feathers.

Not much seems to be accumulating though on our street, I would
imagine that outside of town there is probably around 6" on the ground,
in town there's bubkus on the roads I can see from our windows.

It would much better if we had some kind of sweets to eat, we're pretty
well stuck inside.

Pigs fly, hell freezes over, cats and dogs, etc

The Saints won
last night giving them
a trip to the superbowl
for the first time ever.

I'm the same age as the
saints and it's taken my
entire life to reach the
big game, and it's about
freakin' time.

who dat say dey gonna
beat dem Saints? Who
Dat, Who dat.

Thanks again President Bush

I just watched a clunky B-movie called Deterrence, starring Kevin Pollack
as the president of the USA, Timothy Hutton as an advisor and one of the hobbits
from LOTR's as a local redneck. It's a pretty bad movie that I was semi watching
by flipping back to Top Gear to see their space shuttle launch (super cool)

The movie was interesting because it was made in 1999 starring a couple of
left wing actors and written and produced by French guys, yet the premise
of the movie was that Iraq was reinvading Kuwait, we threatened them with
nukes to stop and they responded by launching nuclear bombs at us.

It contained a lot of information that was common knowledge at the turn of
the century, the president of Iraq was Uday Hussein (so we couldn't just wait
for Saddam to drop dead), Iraq was trying for years to get NBC WMD's and they
had them, and were ready to attack Kuwait or the US at any time.

It was just another data point that tells me almost all of the Bush lied meme was just
cynical political posturing by democrats scrambling for power. Things that were common
knowledge in 2000 became hard to track intelligence data points pumped up by
political pressure by 2004.

Bush instead took the much harder decision not to nuke bagdad, or conventionally
bomb them for days or weeks as Clinton did, but invade. I would have nuked them
from orbit, or tomahawked them for months before risking american soldiers, but
Bush didn't. He took the non-cynical more moral decision that I still think will have
long term positive effects, for Iraq at least, even though it cost us a hella lot of money.

Once the glow has fully faded from The One, the comparisons will be even clearer.

Who Dat!

I doubted the saint's head coach a few weeks ago when it seemed like
there was no way that losing 3 games in a row was part of a cunning plan,
but it looks like it was a pretty cunning plan. The Saints beat the cardinals
like a drum 45-14 and they are going to the NFC championship game.

Just beat Dallas or Minnesota, and we're off to the Superbowl.

Go Saints!

The Saints just started playing Arizona, It's already 7-7 and it
looks like both defenses have stayed home and could be a 60 point
game, maybe a great playoff game, but I hope it's a blowout for the
saints.

I'm drinking a white spritzer wine that a friend gave me made up
in Veneto, and opening a bottle of wine is as much preperation as I
want to make for a Saint's playoff game. The first time they went to
the playoffs back in '92(?), they were crushed so completely that the
game beer became consolation beer, and we ended up renting a movie
by halftime.

Hopeful but nervous, excited but frightened. I'm enjoying the Yin and Yang
of saints football, and I don't want to enjoy it sober. Who dat!

Cold weather

A column in the timesonline from the UK mentions that the UK Met service
is saying that statistically this will be one of the warmest winters ever. Of course
that's probably averaging in the southern hemisphere, so even after what seems to
me to be the coldest winter since around 1988, when one of the first times that I walked
out onto the flightline I stepped on a frozen puddle, flipped ass over teakettle and
dropped a tech order book that exploded into 1000 pages of FOD.

Hopefully people will start to come to their senses and ignore some of the stupider
climate change nonsense, like switching to 100% windpower that would lead to
periods like last weeks low temperatures killing thousands of people as they freeze
in their houses. High Pressure = low temp = no wind gives the coldest and hottest
days with lowest available power.

We need to be moving away from burning oil and gas for heat, but what we need to
move to for the grid has to be something that can be switched on and off, not waiting
for the breath of god to turn it on and off. There needs to be an intermediate
compromise that doesn't involve name calling, and a technical plan that is less
of trying to appease an angry Al Gore and more of a detailed look at what is available
and what will be available in 10, 20 and 30 years.

Build more nuke plants, study fusion and advanced storage and hydrogen. Instead of
cap and trade that looks like it will just enrich the Al Gores of the world, I'd put an oil
tax at some level below where prices are today, say $75 per barrel. In the USA I'd make
it an import tax. If prices are high it won't have any effect. If prices go low then low oil
prices won't destroy the economics of alternative energy or nuke power, and in the USA
it won't necessarily destroy the american oil industry again. ( or worse than it is right now)

A cunning plan

According to Jeff Duncan at the times picayune, Sean Payton
is an evil genius and losing the last 3 games was part of the plan
for the Saints to win global domination.






link to photo














I'm not buying that, I'll give him yesterday's game, almost no one
played and I turned it off after the 2nd quarter. But I don't
think this is part of a strategy to manufacture a crises and motivate
this time, I think it's a crises and we'll see how good a coach Sean Payton
is if the Saints can win a playoff game. If they follow the current trend
I'll be watching the colts play the vikings in the superbowl.

Dr Evil I presume

The Gormorgan's Notorius EV
posted a photo of Obama speaking to
Joe Biden and both wearing tuxedos
looking like James Bond villains
trying to figure out what step 2 is.

Step 1. Kill Bond
Step 2. ?
Step 3 Rule the world and get
control of ALL the healthcare.

Here's another photo showing
the president looking like he's toasting
the hatching of another evil scheme.

Bwahahahahahahahhaahah.

photo credit

I told you so too.

Mike at Cold Fury links to an article from IBD:

Before the election of 2008, few Americans described Obama as liberal, let alone socialist. Polls typically reflect media opinion, and the media by and large portrayed Obama as a moderate. Now his far-left views are obvious, and for the first time most Americans see Obama as governing from the left.

What we warned of then is now governance, though we take no pleasure in the validation. The pending government takeover of the medical system (one-sixth of the economy), as well as the ownership stakes taken in autos and banking, not to mention the demonization and planned destruction of the private insurance industry, were foretold by us, along with the accumulation of power to the federal government in the name of “crisis” upon “crisis.”

I share some of the blame for this too, I didn't vote, I didn't get my ballot and mail it in, figuring

that my ballot would go to Texasn anyway, a sure win for Mcain.

Here's what I wrote before the election:

It's not the color of Obama's skin that bothers me, it's that I don't agree with
anything he says or anything that he plans to do. I also tend to think that he
was sent by someone in the chicago machine, or sent by a diabolical marxist organization
that is bent on undermining a free and capitalist america or sent as a product of
an extremely liberal education that was then baked in an oven of an anti-american
preacher. All those ideas might be believable or laudable in some situations, but
I don't want them as part of the makeup of the president of the united states.

sorry America.

Number of the Year

Over at the ever valuable Numberwatch, the Numby awards have been
given out and the number of the month, year and decade announced. The Numby
award for person of influence is Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri.

[shown here accepting
his Numby]









from Wolf Howling:

The man above, appropriately attired in the Chairman Mao outfit, is Rajendra Pachauri. Whether you realize it or not, he is of immense importance to you. He is rich. He is immensely powerful. He has financial interests hidden under a hundred different rocks. And if he gets his way, he will be stealing money out of your pocket and significantly lessening your quality of life. Remember that as you read this post.

EU referendum is covering this as well when they take a break from exposing the
inadequacy of the british MOD.

I'm always amazed that the left/green/communist interpretation of the world always
includes evil oil men suborning governments and destroying the world, but is blind to
things like the man in charge of the IPCC having vested interests in global warming
being true, whether there is any evidence for it or not.

I just had to repeat our company's training on avoidance of conflict of interest and ethics,
and to avoid even the appearance of corruption I can't accept gifts worth more than $200
from suppliers, or own stock in oil companies because I could conceivably have access to
data that could give me inside information. And I'm just a nobody so far down on the org
chart that I have a dashed line connecting me to the janitor.

Dr Pachauri doesn't just have the appearance of conflict of interest, a simple google search
shows that he's a direct beneficiary of the policies he's supposed to be investigating. I prefer
some good honest oilfield fatcats be in charge of the IPCC.

The Number of the year was also presented, and it is the number one.

One stands for the Norwich One, the whistleblower who revealed the contents of emails and program files from the CRU at the University of East Anglia . He provided much solace to those who attempt to continue the tradition of sceptical science, by providing evidence that what they had deduced about what this and associated outfits were up to was, in fact,

congratulations to all the winners.

Instalaunched

Thanks to a link from Glenn Reynolds I just quadrupled the
number of hits I've gotten in the past 3 months in the past 3 hours.
Wow. Very potent linkage.

Thanks for visiting. Please don't be offended by the blog title,
a coonass is just a person from Louisiana of cajun descent. The most
interesting things here are when I was liveblogging about Katrina, and
when I was hotairlaunched pointing out the slant about Haditha from
the Times of London. Otherwise mostly travel and drunkblogging with
some political rants thrown in.

First attack of the new year.

Danish Police just shot a somali man a man who was trying
to attack Kurt Westergaard in Denmark. This was the cartoonist
who drew the cartoon of mohammed with a bomb in his turban. This is on bbc
tv right now, of course they won't show the actual cartoons they are
talking about.

No word on the religion of the attacker.

Happy New Year!

A fairly strange but good new year's eve. This hotel's
restaurant was closed so that it could cook for the hotel's
new year's party that we weren't invited to. Luckily the
excellent staff here at the hotel hooked us up with
dinner in the bar, with good food, good Ouzo, champagne
then more good ouzo.

Today I feel shot at and missed, shit at and hit and my eyes
look like two piss holes in the snow as my father would say, but
the ouzo seemed to kill off most of my sinus infection I've been
fighting all week, making this a worthwhile new year's hangover.