Far South of I-10

Hindrocket at Powerline points out the drop in oil prices since the election. In the news media this drop is reported as due to an incremental increase in production has built up reserves in the US, coupled with a warmer than expected winter. Bullshit. Powerline has it right, someone was monkeying with the markets to help defeat George Bush. In my business, when it isn't possible to measure exactly what is happening, it is possible to infer a model of what is happening from the evidence you do have. When you make a prediction based on this inference, and the prediction comes true, then you can get a warm fuzzy feeling about your model of reality and continue to make predictons based your model until something proves you wrong. The rise in oil prices leading up to the election was predicted in March at The American Thinker. The Saudi War on George Bush - March 10th, 2004 Saudi Arabia has launched an undeclared war on George W. Bush. This simple fact must be understood by pol...

Jim Lileks, in this morning's bleat: "But what do I know. I’m so out of touch I saw that picture of the Marlboro Man soldier and did not instantly fire off a letter to the editor protesting this flagrant and unhelpful depiction of – what’s the word? - reality. Some did, of course. (One of many examples I've seen about.) For God’s sake, if Patton were alive today he’d be slapping civilians . Granted, we’re talking about a select stratum of the population whose undies come pre-bunched, but even by their standards this is ridiculous. You get the sense that this was the last straw for some – it’s bad enough that we have soldiers in Iraq (if we have to have soldiers AT ALL) but to have conspicuously smoking soldiers just rubs their nose in it all. It’s stuff like this that makes the standard imagery of WW2 look like dispatches from an alternate dimension, and makes you wonder how the modern media might have covered WW2. You can well imagine the reports from Norma...

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11412539^401,00.html It is prohibited to kill or wound an enemy who is surrendering or who is hors de combat . ...is the rule from the geneva convention. I think this Marine was justified in doing whatever he did. If he had not shot this insurgent, and the insurgent activated his suicide belt or a hand grenade killing everyone including the reporter, there would be stories complaining about how the marines don't protect imbeds. If the guy hasn't actively surrendered, he's a combatant until he's dead or obviously hors de combat. ( 'out of the fight'; disabled ) In the age of chivalry, hors de combat meant that you couldn't handle a sword or mount your horse. In an age where all you need to do is press a button to set off an explosive charge, when are you out of the fight? If I were president Bush I'd give him a presidential pardon. Of course, if I were president, Fallujah would be a molten glass f...

This entry at Harry's Place really hits the nail on the head. A busy spell on the blog (scroll down if you've not been here for a while), so lets just take stock. After the reaction of 'Index on Censorship' to the murder of Theo Van Gogh (below) where does that leave us in the bizarre world of the post-9-11 left? We have 'peace' campaigners who are in favour of terrorism. We have 'anti-fascists' who support fascists. We have 'feminists' supporting the oppressors of women. We have 'socialists' against trade unions. We have 'revolutionaries' in favour of the status quo and stability. We have 'anti-racists' who support racists. We have 'secularists' against secularism. And now we have anti-censorship campaigners who respond to a political murder by saying the victim had 'abused his right to free speech'. And they say we are the ones who have sold out? The same people who were against su...

Instapundit linked to the Chicago Boys blog where they had a fairly interesting discussion of this whole idea of the blue states secceceding to form their own all liberal, all the time nation : So seeing maps with "Jesusland" and "United States of Canada" should not surprise us. It is the traditional Anglospheric way of thinking out loud about how to resolve seemingly irreconcilable differences. One way is to leave, physically, for some new place -- "light out for the territories", or "go West", or as Davey Crocket put it "you people can go to Hell; I'm going to Texas". And if there are too many dissatisfied people for this method to work, there is pressure to re-deal the cards on who runs which pieces of real estate. Thankfully, for now, any proposed division of territory is merely political satire. But secession thinking is often the first straw in the wind of a storm of deeper conflict coming up. I have sev...

http://www.flowgo.com/funpages/view.cfm/6019

It's kind of interesting yet stressful watching the election returns as the polls close in the east. In reality the decision has already been made who is going to win the election, an observer just has to open the box and see the result. There's no dead cat in this case though, hopefully not a dead country either. Whatever the outcome, this experiment's true outcome won't really be known for years or even decades. That's a more hopeful thought. The sweep of history will decide whether tonight's outcome is good or bad. This experiment is neither cat nor country in a box, it's a box within a box (ad infinitum). Even if the particle decays or the vote is cast wrong, it's neither the end of the world nor the end of the theoretical cat. Life goes on.

(-“The day will come when even this ordeal will be a sweet thing to remember.” -Virgil) For good or ill the non-lawyer part of the election will be over in a few days. If you scroll down to most of the posts below you can guess that I voted for Bush via absentee ballot yesterday. Here's why: To me, nothing is more important then the war on terror. Not the economy, the environment, flu shots, Medicare, Social Security; all that is peripheral to the war. That's because one nuclear bomb detonating in one U.S. city will undo all those things. I think the only way to avoid that near nuclear certainty is to drain the swamp, remake the middle east in some fashion. President Bush is the only one of our two choices that is credibly heading in that direction. You can say that Bush is stupid, but Clinton was probably the smartest president ever, and he nearly destroyed his presidency for a blowjob. Smarts ain't everything. People say Bush = Hitler. Those people should have...

Jane Galt over at asymetrical information has endorsed Bush. The writer is an economist, and they give a complete rundown on all the issues as a head to head competition. Here's the climax, go read the rest: http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004974.html 'Then there's the question of what message electing Kerry would send. Does it make the world love us, because we got rid of the president they hate, or does it make them despise us, because we've just held a referendum on the Iraq war, and Bush lost? Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change. "If you can't live with him exactly the way he is," she told me, "then don't marry him, because he'll say he's going to change, and he might even try to change, but it's one in a million that he actually will." Kerry's record for the first fifteen ...

Below is an excerpt from Victor Hanson column, probably the last before the election. Read the whole thing. If we choose Kerry, our enemies will see it as their victory, that we don't have the will to fight. It doesn't matter if that is true or not, it will apear true to those who wish us ill. http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200410290825.asp "In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about "fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional" conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a plan than George Bush — because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the pr...

Jerry Pournelle is one of my favorite Science Fiction writers who also is very well informed about both the hard and soft sciences. He recently wrote some interesting posts on his weblog that make sense: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail333.html "Actually, what I should have pointed out is that this is not the stuff of presidential debates. Presidents are not division commanders, much less the colonels of security regiments. As to why we didn't know, it's called friction; see Clausewitz for details. Will Kerry now personally take charge of military operations? At what level? It is legitimate to debate whether we ought to be in that war; that is a presidential level decision. Kerry did so for a while, realized that it was losing him votes every time he talked about it, and is now nit-picking the operational decisions. There's plenty to criticize. Much of the the operational level command in the war was dead wrong: no one expected the civilized people of ...

Victor David Hanson is an historian who can easily move from describing the current war to the origins of WWII to battles that built and destroyed ancient Greece and Rome. Always worth reading, here he lays out why Kerry will be a disaster if elected and why he may still win: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson102604.html "In sum, a Kerry presidency will lack either the vision or the resolve to finish the war, resulting in a defeat for the United States in Iraq — with calamitous consequences for the brave reformers there, an end to liberal momentum in the Middle East, a reversal in the conduct of Libya, Pakistan, and the Gulf, and assurance to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran that the United States is conducting not war but a criminal investigation akin to efforts against gambling or prostitution. Chamberlain-like, we will return to the complacency of the pre-9/11 days, regarding the telltale signs of the destruction to come as mere "nuisances." All the hysteri...

Bubba sent me this: ( http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041025-020600-3030r.htm ) "SECURITY COUNCIL MEMBERS DENY MEETING KERRYBy Joel MowbraySPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES----------------------------------------------------------- U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq. An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred. At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council. "This president hasn't ...

I guess one advantage of starting to write a blog, and continuing to write when apparently no one is reading, is that I can say what I want. Sort of like singing in the shower when nobody is around. Of course there is that small chance that someone is listening...the guy in the apartment upstairs is thinking "if that fucker starts singing Johnny Cash again, I'll hang myself". Or the girl in 3c is thinking "is that Frank Sinatra in my apartment building?...I'm wet with excitement". So even though I'm feverishly trying to convince people that they have to vote for Bush, to the point where I'm pissing off people at work who shouldn't be pissed off, I can still imagine with a little bit of pleasure what will happen if Kerry wins. (this is said much better by Christopher Hitchens http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=hitchens ) Kerry and the Dems will have to put up or shut up. They'll have to deal with reality in the present t...

The wife and I drove over from Houston to Lafayette this morning on I-10. I thought the trip was going bad enough when a big-ass rock hit the windshield and put a 2" star on it in Beaumont. Just an hour later we were coming down a bridge in Lake Charles, and it was raining hard enough that I couldn't quite see the bottom of the bridge. I could see the outline of the cars in front of us, and they were swerving all over the road, right next to a tanker truck. One car hit an SUV and they both went into the left shoulder, and the tanker truck swerved onto the right shoulder. I slammed on my brakes, and I thought; "We're good, I can stop waay before the wreck". Just then the truck behind me comes over the top of the bridge and locks up his brakes. I could hear his tires, then to emphasize the point he layed on the horn. I thought we were fucked, but I got off my brakes, since the farther down the brigde I got the less squished we'd be. Then as we got...

http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/2004/10/cant_take_any_m.html "Fine, I'll admit it. I couldn't care less about how Bush does in the debates or if he's wrong about some issues, or a complete Bible-thumping jerk about others. Couldn't. Care. Less. What I care about is whether or not whoever is president will take the fight to the filthy pigs - I mean, the psychotic mass murdering Islamic terrorists - or will hold....summits. (Like a statesman.) Whether or not the next president will give a flying squirrel's ass how France feels about anything on this entire planet. Because you know, we shouldn't. France is wrong and has been wrong for a long, long time. They took bribes from Saddam Hussein and if you think that's untrue, you're just not paying enough attention. Or maybe you don't care. Because after all, Saddam didn't have any WMDs!!! Ah-hahahaha!!! He was just a simple dictator with simple desires that didn't involve WMDs, and we h...

I just read the this excerpt of a speech by Barack Obama on instapundit http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0409250111sep25,1,7098310.story?coll=chi-news-hed "U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs. . . . Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently. "With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don't want to be blown up, we don't want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain," Obama said. "I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don't make those same calculations ."" Which to me sounds like the old Sting song ...

I was just watching CNN at the gym while I staggered along on the treadmill. Surprisingly, CNN tore CBS a new asshole, pointing out how poor a job of fact checking that CBS did, and even worse that there were connections to the Kerry campaign. Since I've been watching this subject on the blogosphere since the first day when LGF posted one of the forgeries in question with the same document typed in word, I thought, "this is like having front row seats at a train wreck". I happened to see this issue from the beginning, when most people in the U.S. are just getting the straight network line from the Media, suddenly CNN and ABC have turned and are chewing the heck out of CBS. Then I realized a bettter metaphor is one of those times in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, where I'm just mellowly sipping a 40 ounce beer on Bourbon street when some beautiful blonde flashes her tits at me and I didn't have to distribute a single bead. I just got a free show.

I took a seminar at LSU that tried to explain what were the causes and history of the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. We spent approximately 1/3 of that reading about and discussing the mythology of the conflict, with the big Isreali myth being that all the Palestinians had abandoned their homes on the eve of the 1948 war to create free fire zones for the Arab armies so that the Isrealis could be exterminated. The Palestinian myth being that the Isrealis forcibly evicted all the Palestinians to steal the country of Palestine and rename it Isreal. There is a tiny kernal of fact in both of these myths, but neither myth represents Truth. Truth observed by an impartial observer (Ed. God, or CBS news?) I didn't study hard enough so that I can remember what the exact sequence of events was 56 years ago, but that class did open my eyes to relative truth, or truth depending on the viewpoint of the observer. That skewed reality due to viewpoint is apparently even worse when the ...

Testing, Testing, Test12, checksound, check I've spent enough time reading blogs that I thought I should finally write one. Maybe this will just be a place for me to post links to keep track of good articles instead of cluttering up my favorites in explorer with links to articles that prove my worldview. Or maybe a place to post pictures of my dog in various forms of repose, that being the only pictures we have of her, since all she does is repose. Or maybe mis-spelled hemingwayesque drivel that will spill onto my keyboard like a new orleans style roast beef po-boy sandwich, drip, drip dripping until my letter keys are all stuck and I have to pound out numeric messages in straight ascii, ranting and raving until my little Columbian girl has to say " oh baby just you shut your mouth". Anyway, we'll see.