War. huh. what the hell it's good for, absolutely nothing

I'm watching Anderson Cooper and the same dickwads from
eight years ago are on there, (wolfowitz and wesley clark)
how we should invade libya or give arms to the rebels or
set a no fly zone. Clark mentioned that he doesn't want
troops in there until there is legal support from the UN.
Of course the US had UN resolutions against Iraq that supported
removing Saddam, yet now 'War is Good'. grrrrr.

If the USA is going to attack Ghadafy, the congress should pass
a declaration of war. People that are for it now can't say later
they didn't vote for WAR, they voted for war. Declare war, say
the aim is to take Ghadafy out of power, then the 6th fleet sweeps
all aircraft out the sky over Libya and drops an LGB on daffy duck.

This video says it all

Oil, Oil everywhere, i'll take me a drink.

Jerry Pournelle has a nice short essay about the craziness
going on around the world. Just to quote the end:

I long ago concluded that we are not capable of guarding the liberty of the people of the Near East, and that we ought to develop our own energy resources. I see no reason to change my views, although it will be far more expensive now. It will only get more expensive in future. We need to drill for oil, build nuclear power plants, and develop natural gas. Those ought to be our first priorities. Once we have energy we can use it to build those green facilities that we are told will save the planet, but if we cannot save ourselves, we certainly cannot save the planet.

I like reading JP probably because I agree pretty closely with
what he says, and he's able to say it without stupid or offensive
jokes. He was against the Iraq war from the beginning, I was
lukewarm for it until it started, then I felt the war should be
supported without being lukewarm.

Where we agree most strongly is on energy. The lunacy of sending
billions of dollars per month to countries that would nuke us if
they could get away with it is astonishing. Having to watch every
oil industry cycle where the price goes up and then crashes, each
time more of the US oil industry is destroyed and we end up importing
more.

Energy is the key. We've got a few trillion left on our mastercard,
we should be building up energy self sufficiency. If the dollar is
worthless at some point, imported energy will be prohibitively
expensive and it might be too late to stop the final spiral down
to 19th century agrarianism, with internet. (very little travel,
and what does occur happens by slow train) "The sheep look up" by
John brunner type outcomes. Or is it Stand on Zanzibar?

Part of the problem is politicians and people enjoy the point in the
cycle when everything is crashed, and gas is $1 again. All the
alternative energy industries reset back to zero, and people go
back to buying hummers (not the good kind). I'm with the greenies
slightly in thinking that fuel prices need to be higher than 90 cents
per gallon. One way to do that is now that oil is $100/bbl again,
setting an import tax on oil to keep a minimum price, somewhere
between $50-$80/bbl, and apply if for natural gas as well to keep
nat gas prices north of $3.5/cu ft.

That will make nukes look cheaper, and solar look cost effective
in some areas, or at least it won't totally kill the US energy
industry every 5 years.

Some other things are still needed of course, convert all trucks
to run on natural gas. Build nukes and clean coal,etc. But anything
we can do to keep money in the US will help build the long term
future.

Coon skin and Muamar hide; makes a pair of jump boots just the right size*

The Gomorgans ask why we don't oblige Muamar Khadafy
and make him a martyr. President Reagan tried in the 80's,
I don't expect anything to be tried now, maybe another speech or two.

Ghettoputer does make the point that Khadafy looks like either
like Jack Nicholson after a rough night, or a sand people from
star wars. I vote sand people.




*from an AFROTC running cadence, or Jodie, I can't remember it exactly
various animals attack, then make a pair of jump boots just the right
size, until the last verse we meet up with Muamar. He was an asshole
murderer in 1987, and he's still an asshole murderer.

New Kindle, old books

Amazon was nice enough to send me a new kindle to replace my dead one.
It's been dead for a while, and I had given it up as a wasted $400.
I finally got around to calling them, and they agreed that the old kindle
was dead and shipped a new one here to Mexico, and are even paying the shipping to return the old one to the USA. Amazing Amazon.

The only disappointment was the shipping email said they were sending a
kindle 2, but a kindle 1 showed up. The whispernet doesn't work outside
the US, with a kindle 1 I still need to connect up to a computer and
drag and drop the files. (What drudgery! he complains; instead of being
stuck in the wilds of mexico with just books in espanol to read...I can
buy any book I want with just a cable)

I'll probably start with "the big short" by Michael Lewis, and a book
by Seth Godin, who's blog is a dally read; he's like the Army, he
generates more ideas before breakfast than most people generate all day.

I did cheat and download a book from project gutenberg, just to have
something immediately, and it's the "Three Musketeers". You can't
beat a book by Alexandre Dumas for quick excitement, but the book has
changed since I read it as a boy, now I see Michael York in every scene,
the memory of the movie has overwritten my memories of the book.

Rainy day, planes trains and apocalypse

Here in Southern Mexico it's been raining continuously for 3 days.
It's cool, not cold, getting down to around 60 F, but it looks
cold and miserable so it feels colder. Reading the interwebs:
Egypt, good luck, congratulations, etc. Hopefully the radicals
won't take over and the worse thing they'll chant outside the US
Embassy will be "Serious knee injury to the Great Satan".

I can see high-speed rail is back on the drawing board. I really
like trains. It's fantastic in Italy,if you live within walking distance
to a train station, you can go from your house to anywhere in Northern
Italy in just 3 hours without a car. It works perfectly in a small
country with nuclear power, everything is all electric, if the price
of oil goes to 400/bbl, train tickets stay the same while airlines
go out of business. (Italy doesn't have nukes unfortunately)

I've taken trains all over europe, the longest run I took was from
Milan to Napoli. 400 miles and 5 hours, which wasn't really that
bad because you're going not to an airport an hour outside of town
and you don't have to be there very early, so a 5 hour trip is 5
hours.

Key things that make trains successful:
- train stations are downtown
- trains are on a separate network then roads, no crossings
- passengers separate network from freight

What makes high speed rail successful:
- high speed trains are on a separate network from other trains
- all distances are within normal airplane travel time, one day travel
is possible if unpleasant
- it's all electric. at some oil price point, high speed rail will
be more efficient if the electricity is coming from coal or nukes.

France is most prepared for the future, with all their major cities
linked by nuclear powered high speed rail, when the next oil shock
kills the airline industry they'll still be ok for internal travel.
I would be ok with emulating france, creating local high speed networks
in the usa with new nukes at the same time to power them.

What I would do if I were emperor, I'd start to build local routes
of less than 400 miles with the nukes to power them and spend money
on research for even faster trains using maglev to build the cross
country routes.

There are two similar length routs (400 mi vs 387 mi) from Milan to
Naples and New Orleans to Dallas, that's about the limit I could be on
a train and still make a meeting on the same day. I found a report
that estimated the building cost for the tracks, two way tracks on
elevated cement roadway, at 20MM euros per km, which is around
$40MM per mile. A 400 mile route would cost $16 Billion.
Or a better route to start with would be the triangle between
houston-dallas-san antonio, that loop would around 720 miles, or
$29 Billion. That triangle route has lots of traffic, lots of people
moving from downtown to downtown.



The purchase of trains versus the purchase of aircraft is a wash. I doubt
we'd save much on fuel costs if you include the cost of a nuclear power
plant to power these things, but we should build them so that we have
availability of travel. We made it through the last crash with some
part of the oil industry left, but I don't see how we can make it through
an infinite number of these crashes. When prices reach $150/bbl again next
year, the economy is going to crash again, then the oil industry. We're
really just starting to ramp up now, after another crash we won't ramp up
at all, prices will just march straight back up again because production will
really be in decline. As the economy circles the drain demand destruction
will kill the price of crude because no one will be traveling.

The reason I think we should be doing this I'm starting to think it's too
late for scrubbing the budget, we're using the credit cards to pay the
mortgage, we should probably build something so that after the crash people
can still travel without having to take a pack-mule.

Irish eyes ain't smilin'

During the peak of the financial crises a couple of years ago,
when it seemed possible that the entire banking system could unravel,
I was in Bucharest for a week. I was having lunch with some Romanians
and they were asking me what was going on in the USA, their pensions
were in AIG. I gave a "I'm sure everything will be fine" that I didn't
believe and felt glad that I had wired some money to Europe the week
before, I thought the dollar was going to continue sliding.

I apparently suck at financial analysis because I had sent the money
at the peak of pessimism at 1.55 eurusd, then sent most of it back at
the peak of european fear last year at 1.25. Doh. (not even doh with
exclamation point, just doh.

Someone who doesn't suck at financial analysis is Michael Lewis from
Vanity Fair. I wanted to buy his book 'the big short' in houston last
year, but I was already burdened down like juan valdez' mule and couldn't
take a hardback book with me. A lot of content from that book is online,
including the story of AIG's trading group as told to Mr Lewis by insiders.

It was good that we didn't let the Romanian's lose their pensions, but
they could have done it without making The Goldman Sachs whole, or providing
a windfall to a guy that was betting against the housing ponzi scheme
instead of screaming about the problem from the rooftops. His story
is told in The Big Short and in a really excellent excerpt we get most
of the story in "Betting on the Blind Side"

That guy Dr Burry is a genius and he deserves to get paid, but very few people
put the whole problem together like he did, and certainly no one in
the government figured it out. (I could see it was a bubble, I knew
that the mortgages were being sold off as bonds from reading 'Liar's
Poker', but I had never heard about CDS' and CDO's before 2008)
Hopefully next time someone sees Armageddon coming down the pike, they
won't just buy CDS's against meteor strikes. ("so if a 100 m tall wave
washes us away, you have to pay $2MM? I'm rich bitches. But don't tell
anyone if they don't buy my newsletter.")

I also like ML's article on the Irish disaster where the government guaranteed a bunch of bankster money, putting the irish people on the hook for a few year's worth of tax revenue instead of just dumping the bondholder's
overboard like the more sensible Icelanders did.

I hope we have a remote off switch for all those tanks

I spent the day watching fox news and playing Napoleon's
campaign in Egypt. I'm making the crossing to Palestine,
and I'd bet the same invasion will be happening soon enough
if the wrong people end up in charge of Egypt.

Egypt deserves to be a republic. A good percentage of the
people in the oilfield are egyptian, and they are some of
the best educated, smartest people, switching from french
to english to arabic at the drop of a hat. Instead, according
to the pols in this article, it's going to be an Islamist
revolution.

But what do Egyptians really think? According to a recent Pew poll, they are extremely radical even in comparison to Jordan or Lebanon. When asked whether they preferred “Islamists” or “modernizers,” the score was 59% to 27% in favor of the Islamists. In addition, 20 percent said they liked al-Qaeda; 30 percent, Hezbollah; 49 percent, Hamas. And this was at a time that their government daily propagandized against these groups.

How about religious views? Egyptian Muslims said the following: 82 percent want adulterers punished with stoning; 77 percent want robbers to be whipped and have their hands amputated; 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.

If that's the case, I'd bet their first item on their agenda
will be taking all the rage on the streets and pointing it to
Israel. Who knows how that would go if it's M1 tank against M1 tank?

Yikes. That curse of 'may you live in interesting times' is very true,
I wish it was the end of history again

End of Weekend humor

Not a very effective weekend. I had to re-revise the revisions
of the edited version of the paper I'm writing.
Apparently I'm the worst user of Word version tracking in the world,
I ended up turning off all the editing popups so I could see what
words were there. I got that sent off, and instead of jogging
around the lagito here, or doing some other work I spent the
rest of the weekend playing Total War Napolean and surfing the
web.

The game isn't too bad, not as good as Rome, and it must require
windows 7 and 32 gigs of ram, because with the 3 GB that xp32 can
use it crashes at every big battle, a couple of times saving me
from humiliation as my last few calvary got chased around the
screen.

I surfed the web and watched some movies too, since my family is
off visiting relatives. One very funny writer is on Altucher Confidential.
His writing is so open that one of the commenters suggested he must
have a brain tumor (cue Arnold "It's not a tuma").
Super funny though. Including stories about his dot-com companies, where he lost millions after making millions. It's good that he can joke about it, I lost a crapload of money but nothing like millions, and if I think too hard about it I'll have to go drink a relief beer.

Here's a clip from his story today about beginner yoga classes:

Chanting. At the beginning of class there’s a chant. It starts off with a big “Ommmm”. I can handle that. But then it goes into something else that I can’t understand. Everyone else is doing the chant. For some reason I blush and I try to hum along with it but then blush more because why am I even humming?

there's a scott adams (dilbert) rule that chanting is always funny.
Dogbert asking a prospective cult member "can you chant" is funny, humming
while pretending to chant is double funny.

The world turned upside down

The funny video showing Chairman Hu in washington like
the new owner was even truer than I thought. One of the
songs the piano player played at the presidential reception
is a song from a movie about the korean war.

Linked from Althouse to the paper the epoch times:

The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” in the song is the United States....

Just from reading James Clavell novels about china and the orient it's
easy to know that they have no respect for westerners, and if this happened
in china it wouldn't surprise me at all. But this was a piano player the
USA paid for, and he provided the list of songs he was going to play to
the state department and the Chinese. Our state department doesn't have
a single person who would recognize that song and squelch it. Maybe we deserve
their disrespect.

Hey, nice stealth jet

Just Dang

Apparently Steve Jobs is still sick and will take
a leave of absence. I hope he gets well not just for
the sake of my apple stock, but because he seems to
create things that I really like (iPod, Pixar, iphone
and itunes). Some jerkwad in bucharest stole my iphone,
but itunes is still a big source our entertainment, for
the times when we've been tvless like the first couple of
months in Italy and before we got skytv here.

On the other hand, apple stock was the last best chance
for us to get rich. I bought it with the remainder of
my dot-bomb account when apple was $15/share. I heard
the first ipod playing in the cubicle next door...how
in the heck did so much music play without repeats I asked?
I put the 2k that hadn't boogered away during the crash
into apple.

I stupidly sold off most of it when it quadrupled, but the
remainder still has gone up 10 times. Fear and greed made
me sell at the wrong time and now hold too long. Tomorrow
the stock will probably go down $50, of course fear will
probably keep me from buying it tomorrow morning. doh.

here's what zerohedge has to say:

Below we present the top 200 holders of AAPL stock. The holdings of the smallest one in the group amount to $133 million. We are confident they will all exit the theater in a calm, collected fashion.

Past is prologue

I just watched "Full Metal Jacket" for the first time since I saw
it in the theater in 1987. I watched it the first time at the BX
theatre at Chanute AFB during AF tech school. They probably should
have chosen a different movie to show there, since the whole base
was full of airmen fresh out of basic training. My main thought
after watching that was 'thank goodness I didn't join the Marine
Corp, since the crazy guy at Paris Island was playing me. I started
Basic training as the fattest slowest guy there. It took every bit
of running around for 6 weeks to burn all the fat off, not a chance
I could have made it through anything more rigorous.

Anyway, it's kind of weird the way the past is telescoping behind us.
When full metal jacket came out it was only 14 years after US combat
troops left Vietnam, and Vietnam seemed like an eternity in the past
at the time. Now it's nearly twice as long back to 1987, and really
just a blink of an eye has passed. (or as the wife says, like 10 minutes,
under water.

Kind of weird too that 20 years ago this week I started in the oilfield,
and that time definitely passed as if I was underwater. But I wouldn't
change anything, working here allowed me to meet my wife and have a
family, without the oilfield I'd probably still be turning wrenches as a jet
mech, drinking 40 oz miller lites every night. doh.

Killer Greens

Over at EU referendum they point to the floods in
Australia whose effects were entirely preventable
and predictable. Similar floods have happened in the past
and flood control projects were shelved in favor of
desalination plants to deliver fresh water to a global
warming parched land.

Good irony. Here's the killer quote:

But the real story is bizarre, another classic example of the greenies forcing major distortions in policy which cost money we haven't got and eventually kill people. Increasingly we see that the obsession with global warming is not a risk-free option. It costs money we can't afford, and lives. This must stop.

Economics says we can't have everything. Choices have to be
made in order to provide shelter, water, heat and power
efficiently. Instead of choosing the most cost effective option
we're choosing the global warming mitigating option:

Windmills, solar, etc. Solar PV in germany when an insolation map would say
there is no point. Talking about windmills in the gulf of mexico
when half the year there's no wind, the other half it's too strong.
In a poor country like mexico they are talking about outlawing
incandescent bulbs so the poor people can't even have a reasonably
priced light at night.

Decision making is so terrible in all levels of government in every country.
People don't understand, when they choose something it almost always
eliminates the other options (Tanstaafl) Choose wisely, or we'll be
spending future winters in the dark and cold.

Pour encourager les autras?

I didn't get to see much news this weekend, I got to
go to a bbq at a fellow gringo's house and attempted to
kill off my various stomach problems with beer and grilled
meat. Didn't work but I had fun.

I missed the ruckus over in TJICistan when after the congresswoman
got shot, TJIC snarkily said one down and 534 to go. Not LOL, but pretty clever.
Half of the libtardosphere went there and commented, what
terrible people they are that inhabit Tjicistan. (A similar situation
happened at work, a coworker pointed out an article from africa where
a guy got eaten by a lion when he went out of camp to take a leak and
I laughed. I even gave permission to laugh at me if I'm ever eaten
while taking a dump, or hang myself with a rope tied to my nuts.) Little
girl shot by nut, tragedy, not funny. Gringo killed in Army/narco crossfire,
not funny. 1 down and 534 to go is not in good taste, but is pretty funny.

It's a terrible thing that happened, but snark is always allowed.
and snarky comments shouldn't cause a visit from the FBI as some of
the commenters are hyperventilating.

After listening to libtards talking about assassinating bush
for 8 years, their gnashing of teeth over this tragedy and pinning
the blame on Palin is pretty fucking rich.


Update 23 Jan - "I Am TJIC"

Apparently his guns were taken away by the local sheriff because he's
a threat. What kind of bullshit is that? So much for free speech.

The best cracker ever

I'm eating the best cracker ever, a slightly burnt saltine,
and the salty/smoky flavors are rolling across my tongue.
It's the first solid I've eaten in two days, which was the
continuation of a really sucky week. I got sick new years
eve, so sick I had to leave a party with free booze and lots
of good food. New years day every doctor in town was closed,
so I went to the emergency room and the guy there told me I have
the flu and gave me an antiviral with decongestant and Tylenol
mixed in (big honging pills that have to be taken for 10 days)

Stayed home all week, still feeling like crap, I went to an ENT
to see what was really going on, and he declared a bacterial infection
and gave me 10 giant antibiotic pills that have to be taken one
per day. I was feeling overmedicated, but better, until those
pills reacted, I ate something bad or someone gave me poison and
my digestive system as they say in the oilfield, reversed out.

The only thing comparable is being seasick on a boat for 15 hours;
with the flu; a hangover and 'irregularity'. I felt like that
point in the movie The Fly, when jeff goldblum holds the shotgun up
to his head.

Everything finally stabilized last night, and I slept like the kind
of sleep where I didn't blink awake or dream a dream, just an instant
of deep dark rest, followed a moment later by waking up in the morning
light, with my family looking at me like, "hey, you're alive". Now
I'm drinking changua caballo soup (onions and salt) and eating the best
cracker ever baked.

Chilly weather

Not much to blog about lately, I have a limited scope of work for
blogging because I don't blog about the most important things in life:
family, work etc, and lately I don't really care about politics (we're
firmly on the 'we're going to have to nuke them from orbit path', so,
down the hatch!). All that leaves is travel blogging, the weather and
scatological topics, and I've been hesitant to write about where I'm at,
especially if I am north of Veracruz, up in eruption of sudden machine
gun battle territory.

That just leaves scatological themes, such as the ever insightful TJIC
being out of action due to as they say on tv; irregularity. The key
insight I could suggest was whatever you do, don't take medicine for
stomach problems, just go somewhere you have line of sight access to
a bathroom, drink liquids and rest. Also, enjoy the weight loss, the
only way I've been able to lose any weight the past few years is to
dance with Monteczuma.

So blogging will probably continue being light, until I get some
insight into some other topic, or a muse comes to visit, but lately
I've been fairly unamused.

Bucket List

If taking a dump on a mexican bus while riding from Poza Rica
to Veracruz was on my bucket list, it's scratched off now. I
made the mistake of ordering something for lunch that wasn't
what I thought it was.

I asked for Steak Pimientado, which I translated as pepper
steak, a piece of hamburger with pepper. In Poza Rica, that
is translated as flank steak with black pepper, plus enough
spicy pepper that I was sweating on the back of my head. I
dove into the baked potato for some relief, it was just as
spicy if not spicier.

All in all, a very mistaken lunch, especially since I had
to take a 5 hour bus ride back to Veracruz. Not a good place
to have a tumultuous stomach, but I survived. The strange
thing is the toilet seat on the bus is spring loaded, so it
does a "no time for sargeants" salute when you get up. Adding
in the bumps on the road, the net acceleration wanted to turn me
into a toilet launched projectile.

The buses in Mexico are pretty good, the ADO Platinium
and GL buses are nicer than most planes now, and bus frequency is
similar to a good train system. There were no nice buses available
for this trip, I expected to be seated on a 1950's era school bus
with people carrying chickens, but in reality it was just the same,
slightly more crowded and without free headphones. I took a coworker's
advice and bought a 2nd child ticket for half price, and that gave me
enough room to take a nap.
buses available

Tubing the interwebs

The weather down here in southern Mexico has been very cool,
lows down around 14-15 deg C. The houses here are just cinder-block
boxes with a thin film of paint and stucco, so the weather inside
feels remarkably similar to the weather outside with a time delay
due to the thermal capacity of the building. Last night it was
warm until 1 am even though it was pretty cool outside by then, but
by 6 am it felt pretty frosty inside.

I've got several presentations for work this week, plus lots of stuff
to write, but I can't seem to drink enough tea to clear out the cobwebs
today, so I'm pretty much just tubing the interwebs. A poor sort of tubing
without a 2nd tube containing an icechest of beer.

Reading Sharon over at smART, she's poetic even when describing getting out
of the hospital.

On the ride home I just looked out the window and watched the lights from the chemical plants shimmering in the dark across the Ohio River. When I was a little kid coming home from North Hills Passavant finally, I remember having the same thoughts…

What is it like to be just one light shining across the water like that, at night

It's always scary reading about being in the hospital. I hope she gets better soon.

....It's now 30 minutes later and I haven't even managed to open powerpoint.
Apart from the bitter cold 60 degree temps last night, we got a good scare
coming in the door. We opened the gate to the carport/patio area when we
arrived home and found the skytv remote inside by the gate. I was pretty
certain it meant we had been robbed of our few meager possessions (everything
is still in the shipment) and they dropped the remote when trying to lift the
tv over the wall.

I crept around the house turning on lights, with my finger ready to be
extended into pistol position (bang bang, take that fargin iceholes).
Everything was still there, unassembled sams club desk, undecorated
charlie brown christmas tree, crappiest borrowed sofa in the world
(borderline better than nothing, but thanks!) and satelitte tv/sams club
LCD TV. It turned out that a friend visiting yesterday had accidentally
picked up the remote in her purse, returning it
on a late-night ninja through the gate mission.

Houston Parking trap - Mexican Consulate

We had to go to the Mexican consulate in Houston a couple of times
this week. The rules for going to the Mexican consulate are: don't
bring any electronics or cell phones, the begging guy outside wants
money not food and most importantly, don't park in the Houston City
Parking lot at the corner.

The first time I went, I didn't see the entrance to the public lot,
and there are 5 or 6 people flagging to park in private lots. I grudgingly
paid $8 to park in one, and I had to make a trip back to the lot to bring
out a handful of cell phones and gadgets.

The next day we made attempt number two for the visa and I parked in
the public lot for 50 cents per hour. I paid an hour, we went in and
came out 45 minutes later to find a ticket. They gave me a ticket because
I had reversed into the spot (as I almost always do). I saved $8 on
the flag wavers, but paid $35 to the cocksuckers at the city.

Since there is a faggot meter maid parked in the lot, I'd assume almost everyone
gets a ticket for something. I paid the ticket, but I liberally sprinkled
bad karma on the check.

Medal of Honor

One good side-effect of President Obama being in
charge is the press is less in the tank against
the military. The American network (mostly cbs+Oprah)
showed a 60 minutes interview with SSgt Giunta, the
Medal of Honor winner.

If you get a chance to watch it you should. SSgt
Giunta was very modest, he said 'I haven't given
anything, Sgt Brennan gave everything.'

Where do we get such men?