Standing like a Stone Wall

I was pretty bummed out and worried that the death of
Andrew Breitbart at a too young age (younger than me)pretty
much dooms us to 4 more years of the current president. I
feel like my ancestors must have felt when Stonewall Jackson
was killed. Sure there are other non-left slanted media people,
but Andrew Breitbart actually delivered, pointing out the
stupidity and hypocrisy of the left. Maybe we can still win
in november, but I doubt it.

But then again, since I can't be in the USA to help fight, I need
to at least blog consistently to do my small part of replacing a
blogging giant.

To get restarted on blogging I thought i'd start with what I believe.
In one article on the life of Breitbart, I saw that he was a
south park republican. The distinction between South Park Republican
and Libertarian eludes me, but I'd go with that title as well.

South Park insults everyone equally. Every ox gets gored on that show.
The truth is I don't care what other people do or believe, but like
south park I do reserve the right to laugh at them if their beliefs
or actions are really stupid. I don't care if people are gay, or get
married to gays, or smoke pot, or crank, or buy sudafed or grow organic
food, of funnel beer or believe in communism, or smoke, eat potato chips, go
to church, don't go to church. Don't fucking care. and the government shouldn't care either.

They definitely shouldn't have people making GS-16 money inspecting
gay weddings, or bunny farms or organic farms or feeling up people in security
lines or arresting someone because their daughter drew a picture of a gun.
In the 90's we could afford to think like that and hire people to do stupid
shit, but we can't afford it. I have to do my taxes this weekend, and even
though I don't live in the USA and get no benefits from the USA, i still have
to pay taxes so some dickwad can make it illegal for me to buy two packs of
sudafed at the houston airport and bring them back here.

We need to be throwing the bums out at every level, elected, bureaucrats,
everyone, and making it easier for the bums that are thrown out to start a
business without any bureaucracy getting in the way. If someone wants to make
a new law "for the children", then they should find two other laws to take off
the books.

To get the growing rolls of people off of food stamps and disablity, the
government just needs to get out of the way and let businesses start up,
let pipelines be built, let wells be drilled. Queers,smokers, tweekers,
stoners go do what you want, but at some point you'll have to grow up and
be men. Take responsibility for yourself. The government should stop taking
responsibility for people. help people when they are down, sure, but the
government can't be the universal nipple, condom supplier, food giver, job
provider, and it shouldn't. Any group that can give you everything will be
able to take everything away as well.

Anyway. to some up. do what you want, don't expect to get bailed out so
stop taking crazy bets. Vote out every single person currently in office.
If you're an expat like me, be sure to vote this year.

First!

I've been commenting a lot on blogs lately, hopefully I haven't
offended Lou Minatti with my depressing visions of the future
economy and geopolitics. I'm still betting that oil prices are going to crash
(which is sad to me) then they'll rebound because decline rates are a
fact of life. Right now a couple percent of oil production per day are going
into storage on oil tankers or storage tanks. When storage is full or if
traders think it is almost full, prices will crash.

The competing effect is whether the economy will increase demand
or if production will decline enough before that crash happens. When demand
starts to get close to actual supply and oil in storage starts to decrease,
prices are going to go back to $140 before you can say peak oil.

One driver of decreasing supply is natural production decline. All oilfield's
production rates decline and if money isn't spent on driling and
workover then production will decline as reservoir pressure decreases.
As long as this "crises" atmosphere continues and drilling stays slow,
production will decline.

The other effect that will drive up long term prices is the dollar. I think
in the medium to long term the dollar has to go down so that trade and
investment comes to some kind of balance. Maybe it's just my upbringing,
but i don't think we can go on spending more than we make forever. One
way that the USA would stop importing so much oil is if the dollar goes down
relative to the rest of the world. The price of oil in the US would go up and
imports would go down until our income and outgo meet up at some point.

That would happen by Obama devaluing the dollar or if enough investers around
the world vote with their feet and sell their dollars. That's when the real nutty
comments started to flow. All of this is a plan by the red chinese! Their goal
was to destroy the usa and create a workers paradise around the world. If
that was their plan, it seems to be on track, as industry and jobs are outsourced
to china destroying our future, while dollars that are acceptable around the
world flow into the mandarin's coffers. [muhahahahaha]

Once the chinese use up some of their dollars buying land and oilfields around
the world in sudan, Iraq, south america, nigeria, then they pop the last balloon
dump the rest of their dollars to make things so expensive in the usa that the
economy collapses and only fuel, food, clothing, steel, cars etc that are made in
the usa are available. The questions then become does the usa have guts to
crawl back out of the hole that we have created? Make our own stuff; make stuff
of high enough quality at a low enough price that other people want to buy it?
Does the chinese government care if their capitalist economy collapses when they
are communists? I think not.

At that point I'm nearly out of red wine so my 'creative' juices stop. Instead of
a gizmo on comments to make sure i'm not a bot, there should be a breathalizer.
Anyway, less commenting in the future for joey. Apparently I cross the line too
easily from witty oilfield guy to neak noil nirther.

'till the end of time

Mark Steyn on that Gates racism incident (not bill)

As Professor Gates jeered at the officers, “You don’t know who you’re messin’ with.” Did Sergeant Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn’t there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts, or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African-American. A black president, a black governor, and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the “post-racial America” will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like Professor Gates unto the end of time.

Kind of depressing but true. You'd think having a black president would demonstrate something, but in reality until a rapper singing cop killing lyrics is elected president,
we're all racists. oh well. down the hatch.

unbearable heaviness of being

I wonder if we're doomed to repeat Vietnam over and
over. From my position it is impossible to tell if Iraq
is vietnam, if it was vietnam from the beginning or if
by repetitive framing over and over the press has framed
the square peg of iraq into the round hole of vietnam.

With hindsight it's easier to see the mistakes that were made,
the press screeches over too many civilian casualties, so
no strict control was established over 'civilians' after the
initial invasion so the country was looted to the ground.

Some idiots playing games pull naked frat pranks on prisoners,
the scream of "torture" goes up, and we end up with a catch
and release terrorist program.

When our soldiers die, there is a drumbeat of reporting that says
how terrible that is, so our troops are kept on safe and secure
bases while a civil war rages in the cities of Iraq.

All these things occur while time passes and life goes on.
Now people are saying the war is lost, instead of too much
micromanagement of president johnson, we have mismanagement
of president bush. It seems like vietnam has repeated again.

I would say that two things have been the same in Iraq as in vietnam,
there was no formal declaration of war voted on by the congress
in either conflict, and there was no response from the government
when the press reported on events as if they were the worst that
could happen.

Every event in the press will always be reported as if it is the worst,
just so that they can attract readers, viewers and listeners. If there is
a tropical storm hitting texas in July, then it will be reported as the
worst tropical storm to make landfall in Texas since george bush was
elected, even if it's the only one to hit in the past ten years. Because
bad events happen every day somewhere, the news
is reported as "bad things are happening everywhere", when in reality
it is "bad things are happening somewhere". This is an example of
the extreme value fallacy

War is hell. War is a dirty business, and civilian deaths, stupidity
and foolishness are some of the horsemen that always ride with war.
The lesson for the next war is that we must have an actual
declaration of war before we do anything so that various idjits
can't come out after and say they didn't vote for war, they voted
for peace with rolling airstrikes, cruise missiles and no casualties.

We can then fight the war on all fronts, on the mlitary and in the
press, and we can say that if we're going to fight we're going to
fight to win. If the press wants to go along they can, but they need
to understand that although things are bad, they aren't really the
worst that could have happened. Maybe if they would add that
fact to stories then reporting would seem more balanced.