Obama and the olympics

Bill Whittle has a good column at ejectejecteject, I like it a lot more than
his videos on pjtv just because I really don't like video on the internet yet,
too slow, too choppy and if you're watching a video on your pc everyone knows
you're not working. If you're reading a blog, who can say?

Anyhoo. He makes a great point that Obama's loss at the olympics
could be a good teaching moment for him at only a small cost to the
country. or in his own words:

This Olympic fiasco, I hoped, would be embarrassing enough and pointed enough to provide a clear data point that this is not always the case, and this lesson, had it sunk in, would come at very small cost to America. After all, the loss of the Olympics in a city is considerably less painful than losing the city itself… which is where this kind of naive ego-centrism can lead us when dealing with ruthlessly self-interested regimes like Iran, Russia and North Korea — expanding nuclear powers all.

I think it's interesting that after 9 months in office the Obama administration is
still floundering around looking like a bunch of monkeys flirting with a football. (nothing
racist intended) I am thinking thank goodness that nothing like 9/11 has happened to
this guy yet and I hope that the evil Joe Biden will step into the Cheney role soon.
("what do you mean ol' joe's not an evil genius, I've never heard of an evil twit before")

I remember after 9/11 there were a bunch of shrieking leftards shrieking that george
bush wasn't ready after 9 months in office, he hadn't picked up the signals and captured
bin laden when all the indications were there to stop 9/11. Right now I would imagine
that bin laden could be building a missile launch facility next to the reflecting pool and
our genius' in charge wouldn't notice.

Wheat, chaff

There's a lot to point to this week in the news:
obama lost the olympics while talking to the commander
for afganistan for 25 minutes, various jerks in hollywood support
a child rapist, david letterman was screwing his employees, etc,
but most of this news activity is fiddling while rome burns.

We need to start changing laws and throwing bums out so that
the country doesn't continue it's current slide. One idea that I can
support wholeheartedly is the idea that congresscritters have to
read every bill that they vote affirmative for.

from beldar's blog:

Every time I deal with a federal statute in the context of giving legal advice to a client — which is an utterly basic function of being a lawyer — I have to actually read and then understand the statute. My failure to do so would be malpractice per se — something absolutely indefensible, something never excusable under any circumstances. As soon as I admitted or it was otherwise proven that I didn’t read and understand the statute, the only question in a malpractice case would be the size of the damage award against me.

But if that’s an utterly basic function of being a lawyer who merely advises private clients on how the law may or may not apply, shouldn’t it be an even more basic function of a law-maker, a legislator, who creates the laws that apply to an entire country?

The queefs in charge of the congress don't even read bills now , the ravening wolves are
feasting on every bill. they don't even bother to lift their head from the trough now to
read the bills, as long as someone (lobbyists most likely) keep filling the trough then
everyone is happy, except the taxpayers.

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The purple avenger at Ace is channeling the ghost of johhny cochran and gives the
pithy summary of a great article over on Climateaudit:

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The much touted hockey stick is no longer mostly dead,
it's all dead.

All of the sudden, it isn’t the “hottest period in 2000 years” anymore.

Steve writes:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

Strong king, weak king or Strong Horse, Weak Horse

From the telegraph:

Barack Obama’s chances of re-election in three and a half years’ time may be evaporating at unprecedented speed, but his presidential ambitions could still be realised in another direction. He would be a shoo-in to win the next Russian presidential election, so high is his popularity now running in the land of the bear and the knout. Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin.

His latest achievement has been to restore the former satellite states to dependency on Moscow, by wimping out of the missile defence shield plan. This follows on his surrender last July when he voluntarily sacrificed around a third of America’s nuclear capability for no perceptible benefit beyond a grim smile from Putin. If there is one thing that fans the fires of aggression it is appeasement.

We've already seen the jihadi response to what they perceive as a weak horse, now
what we'll see is the Russian response to that same problem. One history class I took in school was a history of England to the to the glorious revolution of 1688. A point that was
repeated several times during the class was that England did better as a country
when there was a strong king. Strong kings (or queens) hammered the scots, or welsh or irish,
weak kings lost land to the french or powers to the parliament or to the protestants.

History will tell us which presidents were strong kings or weak kings. Clinton
was lucky in that history took a vacation when he was there. Bush did the best
he could and was strong at times, but I think truly strong kings delegate less than he
did. Obama is starting off looking like a weak king who doesn't care much about
foreign policy. I'm afraid that we're going to find out that if you don't care about
foreign policy, sometimes foreign policy cares about you.

Green Death

Dr Brignell at Numberwatch is channeling Tom Clancy this month

A clear starry moonless sky looked down upon a frozen Britain . A deep depression had passed through and deposited unprecedented quantities of snow on town and country. Snow ploughs and gritting vehicles had cleared a way through on the major routes, but footpaths and side roads were still not negotiable. A stationary high had now settled across the country and in the windless air the temperature was plunging steadily, already below -10C. On the hills giant wind turbines stood motionless in the still air. They were giant impotent icons of a failed religion and stark monuments to onerous and now pointless taxation over many years. In the gloom they seemed to point accusing fingers up into the sky.

At the control centre of the national Power Grid there was a nervous quiet, punctuated by short bouts of hushed conversation. They knew the crisis would occur in an hour’s time, at about 7 am. They had already made the dreadful decision as to which towns would be made to experience suffering and death by being deprived of power. This was a different world from the last time there were serious power cuts in 1970. It was now totally dependent on computer and related technologies. Owing to decisions made (or, to be more accurate, not made) in the first years of the century, the nation was grossly underpowered for such a circumstance. The domestic demand was already high, as almost everyone had left the heating on over night.

Some people had managed to get through to places of work. Cleaners turned on the lights and the great machines of industry began to hum. The power consumption crept up towards the critical point.

read the rest

I like the idea of green power, but it is not very good for base load without a lot
of storage and planning. It can work for a house with a battery backup (or generator),
or for a town that has a fuel cell storing electricity or a pump filling a reservoir, but
for a national grid it's not so great.

I think we should look more like France, not like Denmark. Denmark is hip and cool
and green, but it depends on the kindness of strangers for power when the wind doesn't
blow. France is nearly self sufficient in nuclear power that powers their great metro system
and superfast trains, etc. If we're borrowing the money anyway, we can build the windmills,
but we should also build the nuclear plants and clean coal fired plants.

Who Dat!

The Saints are 2 - 0, this is the happiest time of the year
for a Saints fan, I'm in the "we're goin' to the super bowl baby!"
phase, much better than in the past when I'd think "all we have
to do is win the next 7 games and have los angeles and san fran
lose 4 of those, and we're going to the playoffs". (back in the old
division setup)

I'm not home, so I get to choose between the pro-global warming/anti
american BBC or the anti-american/pro global warming CNN in the hotel.
When I get home I can watch espn america; my sports package has 15
channels of soccer (calcio en italiano) and one glorious channel that is showing
4 or 6 live games per week, plus recorded games and baseball. If the saints
go to the superbowl we'll have the biggest superbowl party ever seen in northeast
italy. Go Saints!

Traveling again

I'm in Tunis for a few days, and the internet is heavily blocked
here, sites like youtube or youpron are blocked. I wouldn't expect
that, it seems very westernized here.

I was hoping to see a video of President Obama awarding the MOH
to the family of SFC Monti. Here's the video on Blackfive from Fox
if your youtube is blocked too.

I saw the story linked on Ace and I read the text from the Army website
and I wondered what Obama's delivery looked like. I'm glad he looked
like the commander in chief and did a good job honoring SFC Monti.

"A moment later, he rose again. And again they fired everything they had at him, forcing him back. Faced with overwhelming enemy fire, Jared could have stayed where he was, behind that wall. But that was not the kind of soldier Jared Monti was. He embodied that creed all soldiers strive to meet: "I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade." And so, for a third time, he rose. For a third time, he ran toward his fallen comrade. Said his patrol leader, it "was the bravest thing I had ever seen a soldier do."

Where do we get such men.

September 11th

Best article on 9/11 today is from Bill Whittle, with video that
just isn't shown anymore (it would make us angry) I don't need
it to make me angry, but it should be shown to keep people focused
on what is happening around us.


Men of Harlech! In the Hollow,
Do ye hear like rushing billow
Wave on wave that surging follow
Battle's distant sound?
Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen,
They shall bite the ground!
Loose the folds asunder,
Flag we conquer under!
The placid sky now bright on high,
Shall launch its bolts in thunder!
Onward! 'tis the country needs us,
He is bravest, he who leads us
Honor's self now proudly heads us,
Freedom, God and Right!

Rocky Steeps and passes narrow,
Flash with spear and flight of arrow
Who would think of death or sorrow?
Death is glory now!
Hurl the reeling horsemen over,
Let the earth dead foemen cover
Fate of friend, of wife, of lover,
Trembles on a blow!
Strands of life are riven!
Blow for blow is given
In deadly lock, or battle shock,
And mercy shrieks to heaven!
Men of Harlech! young or hoary,
Would you win a name in story?
Stike for home, for life, for glory!
Freedom, God and Right!

80/20 principle

I read the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch during a trip last week.
It's an excellent book that has some really important ideas for anyone
that is even mildly lazy. He goes through the easy wins of business analysis,
which is obvious until you actually try and do it (shut down unprofitable
businesses, "but they pay the overhead!").

The real heart of the book goes into applying the 80/20 principle to your
life and career. Most of your production comes from a small amount of your
effort, so focus more time and attention on that small amount instead of spreading
yourself evenly across all activities. If you work on the assembly line this won't
work, but anyone with a technical job or a sales job, a lot of time is just wasted
not moving towards the real goals.

The examples I used explaining this to my wife were Dr. house or Don Draper from
Mad Men. Dr house mostly walks around popping vicodin all day while his assistants
do most of the work until he has some flash of insight and solves the problem.
Don Draper mostly walks around drinking and smoking, has short, to the point meetings
then sends his minions to do the scutwork while he goes off to sleep with some chick.

My wife didn't like that part of the metaphor, but either guy gets his real job done
without caring to spend time punching the clock at the office or doing make-work.
The crucial thing is to decide what is the real productive part of the job using 80/20
analysis, then focus on that while drinking and chasing bimbos. (kidding).

Peak Earl

Peak Oil (Peak Earl as the people from down in the parish would say) was the
topic of a NY times opinion piece and several blog posts last week (on coyote blog and
lou minatti). I was traveling and only had time to comment on Lou Minatti's site, and only that because there was a comparison between peak oil and AGW.

The peak oil opinion piece was a good example of freshman rhetoric, lots of straw
men and hazy mentioning of peak oilers and their anecdotal data. If I knew just
what the average person does about the oil industry I'd probably be convinced and
go back to driving my SUV like nothing is happening.

Here's the most annoying 'graf:

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

I have several problems with that, he doesn't cite any of the poor analyses of data, he doesn't
name names and he uses malthus as a dirty word. For me the most important analysis of
data was done in the fifites by M. King Hubbert where he made the connection that because
we can draw a production curve that predicts max production and total production for a
field, we can do the same thing for a region or a country. Hubbert's prediction was very
good science, he had a theory that production in the usa would peak, he made a prediction
and he was proven right. That is science not belief.

The reason that Malthus has been proven wrong about food production and mass death is
precisely because we are putting more energy into the system in the form of hydrocarbons.
Oil production is precisely malthusian though, even if the earth was just one big sphere of
oil, eventually one day it would run out. The reality is worse, there is oil and gas in the
ground in limited reservoirs around the world and it will run out not in the distant future
but within 200 years, and as an economic resource much sooner.

here's a good straw man argument:

Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

This is really good rhetoric because it would take a lot of work to disprove since he doesn't
cite any data or a specific case where this is true. It's more of a straw army because it
mentions several parts of the industry across boundaries of knowledge, how oil reserves
are booked is one of the dark arts, and I would never be able to argue against that. I'll take
one straw arm and try to shoot it down, the idea that estimated oil in place is normally
revised upward over a field's lifetime, and it's not reported.

In my personal experience being involved with a worm's eye view of the process of drilling
and logging wells, the most optimistic estimate of oil in place happens when nothing has been drilled and seismic data is just estimating the area and thickness of the reservoir. A well
is drilled that confirms the reservoir is really there, then more wells are drilled to laterally
define the area and volume of the reservoir. These "step-out" wells continue until the
reservoir rock isn't seen any more on the well logs, or the well intersects the reservoir
below the oil-water contact. More infill wells are drilled and production begins.

What I've seen is typically the seismic is optimistic, then as the wells are drilled either the
reservoir isn't there unexpectedly, or it is found to be faulted in some way that the reservoir
isn't continuous and needs more wells to produce the field. Off the top of my head I can think
of a dozen wells where there was some problem and the expected reservoir wasn't there, but only 2 where there was much more than expected.

A nice using of the vague arm waving argument:

A related argument — that the “easy oil” is gone and that extraction can only become more difficult and cost-ineffective — should be recognized as vague and irrelevant.

Here's a chart from a good primer on peak oil. I'm sure they are
slanted, but if someone has another chart that shows more fields are being discovered now
than in the past, please post it. It shows that production is steadily increasing while we
are finding fewer and fewer new barrels.

Sure we are still finding fields and
doing it more efficiently than ever,
but we're finding fewer and fewer
new fields when the technology being
applied is amazing.

In the '60's when a field was found
using 2d seismic that was pretty good,
with 9 out of 1o wells being dry holes.
Now with 3d seismic it is possible to
drill wells and have people say they've
never drilled a dry hole.

In the past they were using a bow and arrow and still finding oil, now we're using a laser
scope and hitting fewer and fewer. I too would say the easy oil is gone.

To me the peak oil argument is easy to understand, it's just taking the integral of all the
production curves of all the wells in the world, plus new discoveries plus improvements
in production. Since so few new fields have been found lately, much of the increase in
production has come from improvements in production technology, with secondary and
tertiary production techniques.

Counting on new production techniques to continuously improve
production will lead to a production curve like canterell, with continous injection to
maintain pressure and sudden production drop as the oil/water contact moved
above producing wells. (i have no idea what happened there, I'm just guessing). The
reason the high water cut from saudi fields is so scary is the same thing could happen
there. Instead of declining pressure gradually reducing production, the pressure stays
constant due to water injection, as the oil water contact moves steadily upward more
and more wells "water out".

I don't know what will happen in the future, I'm sure it will be similar to the past with
cycles of demand increase, price increase then demand destruction as people switch to
alternatives at high price points. Demand falls then price falls crashing the oil industry
and reducing supply and the cycle starts again with a frequency of about 5 years. Peak
oil is the background curve that this occurs against, at some point in the future demand
will increase and no oil production increase will be possible at any price (sort of like last
summer, but worse).

It would be best if the usa would be working on this problem in a way that prevents some
future giant shock, like an import tax on oil and gas so that people are moving to
alternatives now instead of waiting for a big shock to do it. Also building nuclear plants
and space based solar power. It does no good to have gm electric cars everywhere, if there
isn't any juice.

Don't use Hotwire

I used Hotwire to book a hotel room in rome last week. I won't use them
again. They have a business model where they list prices and star level
without saying the hotel name. I think the underlying assumption is supposed
to be that they are honest, otherwise why would I buy a box without a label?

They aren't honest. Or they are incompetent. Or both. The hotel that was
supposed to be 4 star was at best a 2.5 star hotel. No internet, no gym, resterant
only open for dinner, no room service, no valet parking would make it a non-
4 star hotel for me. But then the rooms were crappy, worn, small, crappy TV
with few channels, crappy snotty service, which to me make the hotel a 2 star.
(hotel Pacific).

Anyway. Don't use Hotwire, they suck, their answer was they went there this year
and rated it themselves as a 4 star. They can't do math, they said their fare was lower
than the hotel's posted fare, it was $10 less on the hotel's website than hotair.

for google: hotwire sucks, hotwire sucks hotwire sucks.

downside of 1st class

I paid the extra 10E
for a first class ticket
on a trip to milano, thinking
I can plug in my laptop
and work instead of just
sweating in 2nd class.

Unfortunately I forgot
my power supply, so
I just sat in 1st class
and watched the scenery
roll by very quickly
as the new fast train
ate up the distance from
bologna to milano in about 58 minutes. Unfortunately, if you're in
the last car of the train the trip to the station door in milano is pretty
long. This picture shows the huge painting on the wall of the station
that is about 100 yards across.

healthcare hustle

The Czar of Muscovy has done a great service by reading the
entire healthcare bill from the House of representatives. I wish
I could do something similar, but I struggle to read a tax form;
"if you paid taxes to only one foreign country use column a in part I
and line A in part 2....zzzzzzzzz."

Various parts of the summary scared the heck out of me, the Czar's
summary says it best:

Reading this bill in its entirely leads to some inescapable conclusions: the supporters and authors of this bill clearly do not understand its contents, nor do they understand all possible interpretations and implications. ...

But the Czar realizes that this bill is very much like President Obama himself. Rushed through without proper review, and containing an unfocused blend of various liberal and radical ideas, the bill promises extensive reform, but ultimately cannot provide specifics beyond trivial process and procedure.

Woman

John Lennon's song "Woman" is playing on the top videos of all time show coming
out of the living room. at the same time I read this quote of the day on Neptunus Lex:

“Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her your love, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal.. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of sh!t.”

heh.

Signal and Noise

So much of what passes as the results of global warming is due to
aliasing. Aliasing occurs when a signal is sampled too frequently or not
frequently enough, when the samples are used to recreate the original
signal you get the wrong answer, such as a hockey stick fitted to a sine wave.

The real temperature signal is a sine wave, or several sine waves superimposed
on one another. A long term glaciation signal, a short term multi-decade oscillation
and probably several others in between. Unfortunately the most common sample
of temperature data is a human lifetime. We remember that when we were young,
it was hotter or colder, but now it is different, and it is worse. It's such a common
experience that it is enshrined in jokes ("back in my day we walked two miles in
the snow to school, uphill both ways").

Some examples of this effect:
We used to see several hurricanes per year way back in the 1930's, but now we see
more. The temperature at the airport used to be much colder than in the city,
now it's the same. We used to have zero sunspots at the solar minimum, now
there are several even though they are not visible without electronics.

All of these measurements that seem to be proving global warming could just
as easily be just proving that our measurements are now much better, or they
are much worse than they used to be, but they are not the same.

More measurements, more science and less demogogery are what's needed now.
Instead we're getting the inverse.

On some future dark day...

At the Hawaii White House:

General: "Sir, I'm sorry to report, but all 187 F22 fighters were destroyed on the
ground by terrorist attacks"

President O: "We should be ok, we still have our Joint Strike Fighters"

General: "Sorry sir, none have been delivered due to project delays, all we have
are the two demos, one flies just up and down the other flies forward but doesn't
have any weapons."

President O: "Luckily a far-sighted politician was ready for this day, equipping the
one branch of public service always ready to use the equipment at their disposal.
Get me Nancy Pelosi on the phone"

(cue music: da da da de da da dedede da...highway to the danger zone...)

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.

Not science

From a letter to jonah goldberg at the corner, linked from the always
informative watts up with that?:

to be science something has to be testable and falsifiable. It must produce a predicted data point, interaction or outcome that is unique to the theory and can be verified or falsified. Would you bet your future on the accuracy of day seven of a seven day weather forecast? That is essentially what we are being told by the AGW proponents we absolutely must do without delay.

I agree wholeheartedly that AGW isn't science any more.

I use geological models to predict what will happen while drilling a well, once the measurements deviate from the model, if the measurements appear to be working correctly then I know the model is wrong. The AGW crowd has a model that doesn't predict what is happening now, and
their model is using data from temperature measurements that have bad data in them.
Global warming hysteria is nothing but chartmanship and pigs wanting to take their place
at the trough.

They should go back to doing science. Review the temperature record, make more measurements and come back in ten years.

The actions we should be taking should be rational and should have a different set
of priorities than reducing CO2:
- Energy independence
- prepare for the possibility of peak oil. (total oil production may or may not have peaked,
but the most important one, production in North America has peaked)
- assure cheap energy for the future
- minimize pollution and increase sustainability

Meeting those kind of goals will take planning, foresight and wisdom, and will
not be reached by sticking 300 pages in an already bloated bill at 2 am in the morning.
Unfortunately, I don't think the current government is capable of planning, forsight or
wisdom.

'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.

To the barricades!

TJIC links to a story about a man that spent 2 years in prison
for not following federal regulations regarding storing sodium.

Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he’d done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser…

The good news is that a federal jury in Alaska acquitted Krister of all charges…

The bad news, however, is that the feds apparently had it in for Krister…

Two years after arresting him, the feds brought an entirely new criminal prosecution against Krister on entirely new grounds…

According to the government, when Krister was in jail in Alaska due to the first unjust charges, he had “abandoned” his fuel-cell materials

TJIC suggests a citizen's tribunal against the judge and prosecutor,
I think tarring and feathering needs to make a comeback. Something
that is an obvious mark of the community's scorn, doesn't cause permanent
injury and can be bought at the home depot then applied with a small
crowd. Maybe duct-taping them naked inside a roll of fiberglass insulation
or dying them blue would be a good modern equivalents.

Unexpected consequences

Meghan McCardle links to the news from the 1930's blog comparing
green shoots in the economy today to green shoots that seemed to be
appearing in 1930. Linked in the same day's WSJ was the story:

Hoover signs London Naval Treaty; now awaiting ratification by Britain and Japan. Under conditions of treaty US will reach naval parity with Britain by 1936; Japan naval building will almost stop.

In 1930 this must have seemed like a small story compared the economic crises
of the day, sort of like voluntarily canceling the F22 program is today. The london
naval treaty gave cover to the usa and britain that didn't want to build ships to stay
ahead of the japanese, when the earlier policy for britain was to stay twice as big as
the nearest competitors, post-treaty parity would be acceptable. Only problem being
what happens when you are fighting the germans and the japanese attack in the
pacific.

I wish I had more confidence in the government that they were paying attention to things all around the world, what development will bite us in the ass in 2020 when Hillary is just starting
her 2nd term and Obama has just finished chiseling his own face on mount rushmore.

To me buying more F-22's is cheap at the price right now, as is another aircraft carrier
and strategic missile defense. In the 10-20 year timeframe that borrowed money will
either be paid back easily in inflated dollars, or the government will default. The option
where the economy grows it's way robustly at 4% and we pay back all the debts a little
at a time seems unlikely. Borrowing money to build things that will last 30 years is a good
idea (weapons systems, nuke power plants, space based solar power, x- prizes). Borrowing
money to pay welfare is the same as buying groceries on a credit card, you buy, eat and
crap it out, then you owe the money.

Hopefully some of the genius' in washington are looking for future ass-biters and thinking
what to do about them. Here's today's wsj headlines that I think could spell problems down the road:

Biden Says Weakened Russia Will Bend

Biden said Russia's economy is "withering," a trend that will force it to make concessions on national security, including loosening its grip on former republics and shrinking its nuclear arsenal.

California's IOUs: Latest Sub for Dollars

To creditors of California who got paid in IOUs, take it from historians -- things could be worse. You could be getting clamshells or plywood.

• Photos: Depression-Era Currency

Iranian Police Disperse Protester

Iraq's Kurds Head to the Polls

• Ahmadinejad Bows to Top Leader
• 
  
• Pakistan Court Delays Terror Trial
• • 
    

Avanti

The movie "Avanti" with Jack Lemmon was on sky this morning, it's a pretty funny
movie with most of the comedy based on quirks that are seen in italy. The 3 hour lunch
when everything is closed with 16 kinds of pasta available was spot on, but I thought the funniest
was the scene in the morgue at 8:10 in the above clip as the coroner stamps all the forms
in triplicate, then sticks other stamps onto each form. That really captured the individual
style of italians while showing the omnipresent bureaucracy here.

St apollinare's day

Today is a holiday in Ravenna, for St. Apollinare
I took the day off from fighting with software and slept
late then read in a cafe for a while before eating some really
excellent lasagna. Then I went to see San Vitale because it is
open at night this month, but I forgot my italian id card, so I had
to pay 7 euros like any other tourist. doh!























From Oscar Wilde's "Ravenna":

But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all,
Thy ruined palaces are but a pall
That hides thy fallen greatness! and thy name
Burns like a grey and flickering candle-flame
Beneath the noonday splendour of the sun
Of new Italia! for the night is done,
The night of dark oppression, and the day
Hath dawned in passionate splendour: far away
The Austrian hounds are hunted from the land,
Beyond those ice-crowned citadels which stand
Girdling the plain of royal Lombardy,
From the far West unto the Eastern sea.

















Ravenna is nice after about 3 beers in a cafe, with some nice old buildings, churches
from late antiquity and even the modern buildings from after the 2nd world war are
fairly artistic, and I'm sure it was even nicer before the walls were dynamited in the 19th century.

Round and round we go

There's an interesting article over on slate about the adoption of
roundabouts in the USA. Apart from Lee Circle in New Orleans, I can
only think of one other roundabout and it's a new one that was put in
5 years or so ago in Lafayette.

Here in Ravenna they are everywhere, from my house to the office there
are 6 of them in the route, with only 2 traffic lights. For low to medium traffic
intersections they are fantastic. On the way to work in the morning they allow
you to zip through intersections without much fear, while the two traffic lights I have
to cross are still blinking yellow lights when I go through and I must treat them as
possible collision points. If I had to pass thorough 6 normal traffic lights on the way
to work, it would take me twice as long to get there.

For the high traffic intersections they make life interesting, and it took me a while
to learn the pattern, a key thing to watch for being cars exiting onto the same street
you are entering from. When a car exits, he's in the right lane or crossing from the inside
lane to the right lane and he'll block off the traffic entering from the next street. This
is when you can go...and go go go.

Italian drivers are the most aggressive in the world, if you're not going when you should be,
they are on the horn. They zip around roundabouts like F1 drivers whether they are in
a smart car or a 20 ton garbage truck. I don't know if the plethora of roundabouts and small
cars made them aggressive, or if they started out aggressive when they took their first
chariot out of the garage. It will be interesting to find out as more roundabouts appear
in the USA, it's one thing to zip around a roundabout in a Fiat, but when you have to do
it in surburban eating a cheeseburger and talking on the phone it will be even more interesting.

Sheeple

XKCD has been on
a roll the past week.

Change in strategy

Neptunus Lex links to an article about a briefing where our old
"two war strategy" becomes a "one war strategy".

Chambliss asked Cartwright "what is the military requirement for the number of F–22s?" The senator got much more than he may have bargained for in the general's reply.

"The military requirement right now is associated with the strategy that we are laying out in the QDR," Cartwright said. "And it is a departure from the two major theater war construct that we have adhered to in the past and in which this aircraft grew up. I mean, it grew up in that construct of two major theater wars, and both of them being of a peer competitor quality..

Gee, I hope no evildoers around the world read tom clancy novels. If two countries
that want to do the USA harm own something as complex as a telephone, they could
coordinate their ne'er do well activities and the outcome won't be as pretty as it normally
is in Clancy's novels if we don't have enough planes to get the job done.

I'm just a student of history and a tom clancy fan. If there is some 3 star general that
disagrees with this plan, now is the time to speak up publicly. Don't wait until you're a
cnn commentator in 10 years and say "I was against that policy". For me, if we're going
to waste stimulus money borrowed from the chinese, at least spend that money on something
useful like a bright shiney new F-22 Wing or 2.

Working from home.

I dragged my eyes open this morning with no bipping or beeping alarm
going off on the night stand, I grabbed the silent cell phone to see why it wasn't
beeping or at least see what time it is...dead.

The digital clock across the room steadily blinked the wrong time,
so I struggled to fight against the glare coming through the
plastic shutters outside the window to see if I could tell by the slant of the light
what time it was. It's bright and painful to the bleary-eyed is all I could tell.

My cell phone worked it's way through about 6 splash screens, yes it's a palm,
yes, i'm with vodafone, finally a pin, which I manage to enter without fat fingering.
Holy Heck! It's 11am!

I managed to flip back almost to new orleans time after fighting jet lag for a week.
Well, at least there are no missed calls, so I must do the coverup. Like a watergate
operative I log on and zip out a couple of mails, and download 40. Krap! someone
had asked for something this morning, problems with the data I sent yesterday evening.
Luckily a further email says it was their mistake, wrong file.

I have succeeded in playing hooky, even if it was a mistake. mwa muhahaha muhahahahaha
muhahahahahhdhahahahhahahahahaha. cough. I better get a cup of tea, my throat is
dry.

Not brave

A bad day here in rainy italy. A typical italian day in this strange
summer that hasn't seen much sun yet. I was walking to lunch with
coworkers, my hung-over taste buds starting to awaken at the thought
of some gnochetti, when I heard a !crack! from down the street and I looked
up to see a semi truck had hit a motorcycle. The motorcycle exploded off the
front of the truck and I didn't see where the rider went.

We stood in shock for a second, and since the accident was only about 100 meters
away I could see that the people getting out of the truck and a couple of cars were
still in shock as well. No one was rushing to the motorcyclist. I started to walk towards
the accident thinking that if no one else was going to help then I should, I had the weirdest
thoughts because I couldn't see anyone hurt, was the guy unhurt and walking around,
or was there no rider and just an empty motorcycle was crushed?

As I got closer I could see the victim. And I was glad to see that people were starting
first aid and speaking with the emergency operators. My italian isn't normally good enough
to offer first aid advice but I could not think of a single word in italian to say. I was so relieved
that I didn't have to try and give first aid that I felt nothing but guilt, all the first aid classes
and buddy care classes coming to nought. Relief and the knowledge that I would probably
be sick if I stayed made me back away then walk back to my coworkers trying to control the
shaking in my hands.

Great Lileks - bleat - July 9th

And so it came to pass on a weekend night that the entire crew was assembled upstairs at the Valli at 1:30 AM, waiting for pancakes. In my mind everyone’s there: Dime-A-Time, the goat-aroma math professor who always sat in B-8 and never tipped more than ten cents; the perpetually grinning and grizzly-faced bobble-headed idiot savant who would sit for hours during peak time working problems on napkins and graph paper; the couples in the private booths of A section, the regulars in B, where you could see everyone come in the door. The loft is open and full. The kitchen’s sizzling - orders shouted, dishes crashing, Springsteen coming from the cook’s radio. Sam’s on the grill; maybe it’s Mickey. (He was the local revolutionary; I saw him the other night on an old 90s episode of COPS. He was leading a protest downtown. There was a scene in which he exchanged words with an officer, but it was with the bounds of civilized discourse. At the end of the segment the policeman said the event went pretty well, but they’d had to arrest some people, and Mickey had bit a cop.) I’m with the Giant Swede and the Crazy Uke in B-5, probably. Probably Jack as well, working through his third pack of Marlboros. In A-4: Mike, and probably his girlfriend, and a couple others. Mike looks dark and drowsy.

In Brackets

{One thing that bothers me about this multi-culti world is when people say things that
make my blood boil like "jews are in control of the united states" usually uttered by someone
that lives either in in arabia, iran or north africa. How do you contest such a statement?

Then the next statement is that Iraq was invaded so the USA could have oil. Uttered by someone in the oil industry that should know that oil is sold on the spot market in an auction that gives the highest price that day. Assuming the money from the iraqi oil is going to the iraqi government...what was the big benefit of invading iraq for oil, when we could have just taken the several hundred billion dollars spent there and buy oil? ...but then the answer is that of course
the iraqi oil money is going to the usa. The number that I was too drunk to grope for was that
the iraqi oil production is only 2 or 3 million barrels per day. Even if the USA stole all of that it would only be 3000000*60*365= 60 billion per year. (sounds right but i'm too drunk to tell).
Versus the Trillion or so we've spent taking Iraq.

Note to overlords, next time steal a country with more production. Please.

close brackets]

future shock

A really important post over at the oildrum that outlines what I think
will be happening over the next few years.

We now appear to be bumping our heads against an invisible ceiling, where the decline in real energy meets our pain tolerance for high prices. When gasoline hit $4 last year, it created real demand destruction because people simply couldn’t afford it with their evaporating dollars. Likewise, the spike in natural gas and coal prices ultimately translated into such high prices for basic building materials like cement and steel that demand was curtailed.

The economy is going to be squeezed steadily lower by decreasing availability
of energy. As energy prices increase, the economy spirals downward which crashes oil prices
leading to reduction in availability. I think this cycle will be repeated over and over in the coming months and years so that the business cycle will lurch from ´greenshoots´ to further
deepening of the depression.

We´re already seeing this at work where it is slower so that prices are coming down (the crises!),
but we´re still kind of busy because layoffs are cutting out the cushion of people that allow us to take advantage any extra business. None of the oil industry can ramp up in matter of weeks, it takes at least months to get tools and people, as soon as tools and people arrive things are slowing down again.

What the government should be doing should be a crash program to provide energy self sufficiency in the USA. Nuclear, Solar, fusion, oil and gas. Instead this cap and trade bill will probably finish the destruction of the domestic oil and gas industry if it passes the senate.
(I haven´t read it, but since neither has the house of reps I´m guessing it will be a giant boondoggle with lots of poorly thought out ideas chock full of unintended consequences).

What the bill needs to do is drive conversion of cars to natural gas and hybrid. Construct dozens of new nuclear power plants. Create dozens of plants to construct PV panels and wind turbines. support the drilling of natural gas in the USA. I´m guessing that it will drive some construction of wind turbines and pv panels that are made in china, but not much else.

We´re getting down to nut-cutting time as far as decisions go, the question will be what should individuals do to ride out the storm with some kind of style. I think the key will be personal sustainability, the ability to generate some amount of power and food as electricity rates skyrocket will be important. Anything imported will be prohibitively expensive and or the value
of dollar denominated accounts will go toward zero.

I´m personally stuck with one monkey´s paw wrapped around a job I´m too afraid to let go of and one paw grasping around looking for another. I think I´ll be forced by circumstances to take
my own advice when I get downsized in the near future.

Political quiz

My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.5, Libertarian: 2.04

Political Spectrum Quiz

We are Sinking!

Hubris

I added some new links to the blogroll for blogs that I've been
reading lately, the first being the Ancient and Noble order of the
Gormogons. I don't know much about poland-lithuania, but I definitely
agree that val kilmer rocked in Tombstone, possibly making him the
hidden imam spoken of in scripture. ("a huckleberry shall rise up in
the west, and do a good job with The doors, but he shall do a poor job
of the Saint")

This morning they are talking about Hubris. Specifically that AGW
scientists are talking about geoengineering to solve the global warming
problem Re: Hubris This is true hubris to think we've
spent hundreds of years creating a problem, so we'll just make some adjustments
to old planet earth and that will fix it. I don't think we understand the earth's
atmosphere and oceans well enough to go mucking around with anything.

I'm much more worried by global cooling then by global warming. I think
that if its very hot, then it must be sunny and we can use PV panels to run some
air conditioning. I can't picture a hot cloudy climate. (venus?)

If some scientists go mucking around with the earth when they don't really
know if it is cooling or warming and they do something that will make the planet
cooler we could all be screwed, huddling in the dark and cold.

I was googling around for the source of the quote "you shall be as gods" (doh! genesis)
and I found an article on a mural at MIT.

The left panel on the south wall conveys the thought that chemistry has given mankind almost unlimited power and raised the question: shall the power be used to build up or demolish civilization?

The Sheep Look up

I'm re-reading "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner, a book that
I bought at the LSU bookstore around 1986. A science fiction novel
about the near future extrapolated from the vietnam era. It really influenced
the way I thought about the world, it made me think that everything
is polluted and the future will be worse. The modern world would sink
into a miasma of warfare, pollution, lack of clean air and water etc.

In some ways things look worse than the early '70's when the book was
written, the government is broke, a lot of private individuals and companies
are broke, we're still at war with the islamofacists, etc.

On the other hand much of the extrapolation was too pessimistic, the air
is less polluted even in places that were really polluted (california), clean
water is plentiful still and cheap, food is still fairly cheap and it seems like
there are much fewer people starving in the world now mostly due to improvements
in China and India.

Gee, maybe projections about global warming and the imminent demise of the
USA could be wrong as well.

D-Day 65 years later

It's the D-Day anniversary and I thought to post something about
the 101st airborne and Easy company's assault on Brecourt manor.

Googling around it's clear that there were many more similar attacks
made by groups of men pieced together from various units that joined up
in the dark. At one chronicle of the 82nd and 101st airborne they tell a small
part of the tale:

The 1st Battalion, 502d Parachute Infantry (Lt. Col. Patrick J. Cassidy), had a much stiffer fight for its D-Day objectives. Colonel Cassidy landed near St. Germain-de-Varreville in the center of the battalion's drop one and a mile from the first objective-the artillery garrison buildings designated as "WXYZ" in the plan. He gradually collected a small force, mostly from his own battalion, and after discovery of a road sign began moving toward the objective. Objective W, the house at the crossroads west of St. Martin-de-Varreville, was unoccupied. Colonel Cassidy set up his command post in the house and then checked the enemy gun position across the road. There he found a dozen men under Lt. Col. Steve A. Chappuis (commander of the 2d Battalion); Colonel Chappuis, though injured in the jump, had been able to reach his objective. He had decided to wait at the gun position for more of his men. Colonel Cassidy proceeded with his own mission. His plan was, first, to establish defenses at the St. Martin-de-Varreville intersection to prevent the enemy from moving east into the beach area, and then to clean out the XYZ buildings and set up a defensive line to the north.

A patrol sent to check Exit 4 found both it and the causeway clear. The 3d Battalion, in the meantime, reported Exit 3 covered, and Colonel Cassidy, after relaying this information to the 4th Division, turned his attention to consolidating the battalion position. Several groups from Company A assembled north of St. Martin-de-Varreville during the morning. Forty-five men were collected by Lt. W. A. Swanson and ordered to move to Foucarville to establish the right anchor of the battalion line with a series of road blocks. Lieutenant Swanson set up four blocks shortly after noon and within half an hour he trapped and largely destroyed a 4-vehicle enemy troop convoy moving east from Beuzeville-au-Plain. Despite this success, Company A's positions were not secure as they were dominated by the enemy on the hill to the northwest. The Germans, however, made no determined effort to break through, although a fire fight continued most of the day as the enemy probed at the road blocks without discovering their essential weakness.

Meanwhile the fight at XYZ was carried on most of the day by a mixed group of men under Sergeant Summers, while Company C was held in reserve. It was not an easy task. Not until 1530 were the Germans driven out of the last building, after its roof was fired with bazooka rounds. More than one hundred were killed or taken prisoner as they tried to escape. Another fifty had been killed or captured earlier in the fight.

A similar story is repeated for various groups of men as they gathered themselves
together and moved out toward objectives.

.............

Here's a silver star citation for Bravery for PFC Gerald Lorraine
at Brecourt Manor:

Private First Class Gerald J. Loraine 39104951, Parachute Infantry, United States Army, for gallantry in action. On 6 June, 1944, at le Grand Chemin, France, an enemy battery of four 88mm guns, protected by machine-guns, was firing at short range on the beach, greatly impeding the landing of Allied troops. Private Loraine's battalion attacked the battery position, but was stopped by direct fire. Private Loraine, with a small group of soldiers made an assault directly into the battery positions. Without regard for his personal safety, Private Loraine attacked the enemy with hand grenades and sub machinegun fire. Several times he picked up grenades which had been thrown by the enemy and threw them back into the positions. Private Loraine led his small group in the assault on successive positions until the guns were destroyed and silenced. His outstanding bravery in this action enabled his battalion to advance and gain its objective. His conduct was in accordance with the highest standards of military service.

Chinese tea party

One thing the tea parties have missed is the analogy with the
original tea party, the throwing off of boats of imported stuff that
provides funding for the government.

The quickest way to cut spending may be to stop importing chinese crap. They'll stop buying treasuries and we'll stop spending. At that point there will have to be an adult conversation
in the usa about how much we have to spend and how much we
we'll have to cut from budgets.

Sort of the Dave Ramsey cut up the credit cards and go on rice & beans,
beans & rice type of moment.

Even if I don't know if I want to bankrupt the government to make spending
stop, it seems like a good idea to stop buying chinese crap just based on this
review of a book "Poorly made in china".

Midler identifies the features of China’s production environment that make a joke of all the free-trade slogans. There is, for example, “quality fade.” You cut a deal with a Chinese manufacturer to import beauty lotions in plastic bottles. You give precise specifications for the product and container. The first shipments are fine. Then customers begin to complain that the plastic of the bottles is too thin. You squeeze a bottle, it collapses. It turns out that your manufacturer has quietly adjusted the molds so that less plastic goes into making each bottle. Neither the importer nor his customers has been told of the change.

Not to mention exporting jobs and manufacturing ability of the country.
There are lots of reasons to board the ships and throw the containers of chinese
crap into the harbor. The chinese government won't let obama say "buy american",
so one of the things the tea party protests should do is buy american.

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

The forgotten man

I finished the first book that I bought for my new kindle, it was
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shales. It was a really fantastic book and
even though it was written from 2001-2006, it seems like the author
wrote the story with the events of the past year in mind.

The main theory of the book is that most of the new deal ideas didn't
shorten the depression and in some cases prolonged it and led to the
even deeper recession within the depression of 1937. Much of the problems
of the depression were caused by the uncertainty and experimentation of
the Roosevelt administration.

Many of the problems from the thirties are being echoed now, the false starts and various Tarp plans would seem to me to be the worst thing we can do. The treasury needs to make a plan and clearly outline what it is, then implement it in a transparent way so that businesses can predict
what is going to happen. This whole idea of get the evil rich people is counterproductive.
Say what you like about the rich, maybe wealth does trickle down or maybe not, but I know
that poor people don't create any jobs.

As seen during the new deal if you raise taxes so that the government will get the rewards
of any positive result while the "rich" pay for any downsides, the rich will sit on their ass
and buy government bonds.

Here's a good quote from the Kindles text highlight feature:

"New Deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery. The wealthy, after all, were in a position to take risks with new ventures precisely because they were wealthy—they could invest in several projects at once. Under the new 1935 law, a very wealthy man would see more than three-quarters of any profits from new ventures taken by income tax. Any loss, however, would be the same man’s to bear. This man would try to hoard his capital and wait—thus coming to fit the very stereotype of the idle rich man the New Dealers were hoping to propagate."

And here is why engorging the government with a stimulus probably won't help much:

"The problem in 1937 and 1938 was not that the New Deal was mismanaging or helping or punishing one sector of the economy over the other. It was, just as even Democrats now knew, that it was competing with the private sector, and frightening it. The solution to the depression within the Depression was not anything either of the two squabbling sides in the administration was contemplating. If Roosevelt wanted the economy to thrive in peacetime, he had to call off the competition."

On the other hand, it's easy to see that Bernanke studied the depression, continuously dumping
money into the economy is an effort to prevent the deflation that led to such misery as money
dried up, leading to barter and a scrip economy. A similar scenario would be much worse now,
because we have nothing to barter. A good percentage of the people still lived on farms in the
'30's, our over-extended "flat" suburbian economy where we are importing peaches from panama won't last 2 weeks without actual money.

I highly recommend the book.

Kindle2

My lovely wife bought me a kindle for my birthday and so far I like it.
I can see that if we were in the usa it would be super wow, free wireless
access to at least wikipedia if not more, automatic delivery of newspaper and
magazine subscriptions and downloading books you buy right away without a computer.

Here in europe it's still pretty good as a book reader. To get a book or magazine one
has to download it to a pc, then copy it to the kindle as if the kindle is a memory stick.
My only quibble with that setup, is that they used a non-standard mini-usb connector
on the Kindle. Why do that when I already carry a couple of miniusb cables, now I need
another.

It's pretty cool as a book reader, it allows you to read books with one hand and only
takes a short while to get used to not reading on paper. The battery life is pretty fantastic,
it stays completely charged on standby, and judging by the depletion rate it has around
a 20 hour battery life (at least). My favorite thing about reading with the kindle is it
remembers where you left off in every book, no bookmarks needed, no folding pages over
on a corner (I hate when people do that), and it saves me that time of flipping a page or two
to find out where I left off.

I'm looking forward to going to the usa in the summer to try it out on the net too.

Earthquake in italy

The Milan newspaper Corriere della sera (evening runner?) has an english edition
on the web that has more earthquake details:

RACE AGAINST TIME – Yet again for rescue workers, it is a race against time. As the hours tick by, hopes of finding more survivors under the rubble are fading. So far, more than 100 people have been pulled from the wreckage. Digging continued without interruption through the night at L’Aquila, and in neighbouring municipalities, despite the dozens of tremors that punctuated the darkness. The most violent, which came at 1.15 am, registered 4.8 on the Richter scale. At 2 am, twenty-three hours after the earthquake hit L’Aquila, Marta, a 24-year-old student from the province of Teramo, was rescued from the rubble.

What a terrible way to spend holy week, living in tents or in their cars.
The office is collecting things to send down there but another coworker pointed out
this way to donate:

If you have an Italian mobile phone number, you can send a sms to the following number 48580. You will give one Euro to Protezione Civile. http://www.protezionecivile.it/cms/view.php?cms_pk=15409&dir_pk=52

Recursive history and the matrix

it was 10 years ago this month that "the matrix" came out, which was
a super fantastic movie whose premise scared the crap out of me, mostly
because I have enough recursive dreams that I don't need the floating
in a tank dreaming about a computer program story to get weirded out.

I started in the oilfield in '91 and got laid off the same year as the price of
oil ramped up then crashed due to the gulf war. When I was working and the
layoffs started, I had simultaneous nightmares about working offshore and
about being laid off, so when I did get laid off it was sort of a relief.
Then, after not getting a job for 3 months, I was having nightmares about not
finding a job, but was also having nightmares about being back offshore being
worried about being laid off. The obvious scenario was when I was rehired, and I was
offshore and I had nightmares about being jobless, but dreaming about being offshore, and I would just wake up and say "what the heck?".

Since then, whenever there is a downturn and layoffs start, I have circular nightmares
where I'm dreaming I'm unemployed dreaming that I'm offshore, or variations of
that theme until my subconscious looks like one of those infinitely reflecting bowling
alley mirrors.

Since layoffs are started my subconscious has already started cranking
out freaky dreams, but now the difference between 1991 and now is so drastic that
what was a nightmare about being unemployed has become a dream of lost youth,
sort of a "oh my god I dreamt I had worked offshore for 17 years and then I got laid
off" only to wake up and find that yes I'm 42 and not 24. Holy Heck!

Just give me the freaking blue pill already.

Earthquake in italy

There was a big earthquake down south in L'aquila just east
of Rome this morning. Yahoo news says more than 100 people
died and I'm afraid it will be more. That city is like Assisi where we
went 2 weeks ago, a medieval city made of large stone bricks. what
a frightening place to be in an earthquake. Since it hit at 3:30 am,
people never had a chance.

Strangely enough there was a tremor here at 10 pm. It was a short and
sharp temblor that started with a vibration that I thought was a truck passing,
then a sharp motion that was unmistakably an earthquake, I started to run
down the hallway but by the time I moved 10 steps it had stopped.
That was less unpleasant than the earthquakes in Bogota where we were
6 stories up, and the earthquake steadily built, but luckily stopped before it was
bad.

I wonder where we can live where there are no earthquakes, floods, hurricanes,
tsunamis or meteor strikes.

Obama speaking in Strasburg

I'm watching obama's speech at the nato meeting in Strasburg.
It looks like he's using a teleprompter, but it's still a painful speech to
watch. he pauses and stops sometimes as if he's forgotten his place.
I know how he feels, if I'm giving a presentation and I forget what I'm supposed
to say with a particular slide, that is one of the worst feelings in the world

The idea that he's a great speaker is a load of crap.

Now he's doing a town hall. Why? what freaking office is he running for
in Germany. Stop running for office and appoint people to all the spots in
government then govern!
First question seemed to be what are his goals.
-make globalization good for all
-reduce nuclear stockpiles
-reliable health care system for the usa
- usa to take the lead on a new approach to energy...you cannot expect poor countries
to be partners on climate change if our carbon footprint is many times bigger than the average indian person. we have to lead by example.

[one of the things I truly dislike about obama, he constantly denigrates the usa]

next question - all children around the world without rights and are hungry, what is your
strategy to deal with this situation?
-feeding the hunger(sic) and educating the children isn't charity, a pandemic (sic) can get on a plane and go to the west, we have to provide health care, we have to increase our commitments.
we should promote democracy everyplace we can and civil societies that will allow countries to be successful.

is this crises an opportunity to restructure industry in an ecological way ?

- we passed a large stimulus package, we doubled the amount of renewable energy,
retrofitted government buildings, high speed rail...I'm jealous of european high speed rail.
reduce our carbon footprint and achieve our goals.

what do you expect from the french and european countries on the war on terror?
- In the last 7 or 8 years we 've had a lot of tension with our european allies and I want
to work much more effectively, yada yada. after 911 europe responded as true friends saying
'we are all americans'. all of us had an interest in preventing that kind of vicious act. but
after that initial nato engagement we got sidetracked by iraq. Even though i'm now president
and w. is no longer president, al queda is still a threat. ....

it is true that we have to change our behavior and show the muslim world more respect and
change our policies towards the isreal-palestinian conflict.
- usa is changing plan in afganistan, not just a military strategy in afganistan, offer basic services and uphold the rule of law.
"europe should not expect the usa to shoulder the burden alone, this a joint problem and requires a joint effort". in dealing with terrorism we have to uphold our values, that's why I closed guantanomo. abu graib wasn't a good policy.

last question "your name in hungarian means Peach, have you regreted running for president?"
- some times during the campaign and some times during the last few months it was heavy.