Far South of I-10

Rob's daughter Sam has posted that Rob passed away this morning. I really enjoyed his writing, he was funny and told his many stories, anecdotes and musings in a straightforward yet colorful way that I'll miss. Rest in Peace.

I've been reading the NYtimes online for awhile now, since the time when I worked in south america in '99 and '00 and my only other source for news was "the economist". There has always been a slant in the Times and you have to take what is written there with a grain of salt in the same way the newspapers in south lousiana have to be adjusted slightly leftward to see reality, the NYTimes can be read and gleaned for facts, while discarding the veneer of slant. I'm not going to do that anymore until their policy of spilling state secrets on a daily basis ends. Every time I click there, I'm giving them pageviews that they can use to sell advertising. They don't deserve that, they are selling out our country to sell papers by publishing classified information that I don't really need to know. I want to watch the history holovision channel in 30 years and find out the real scoop about how we defeated Islamofacism, not hear about the great miraculous ...

I'm up in Anchorage this week and I'm staying at a hotel that is chock full of animal trophies in the lobby. The big one over the mantel is a moose that looks out on my blogging with a dispassionate eye. I spent the last two weeks outside Calgary, where the sun set at 10 pm, and rose at 3 am leading to me not sleeping more than 3 hours a night for two weeks. Then I jetted home to houston so I could spend our anniversary with my wife, and now I'm up in anchorage, bleary eyed under a moose. We're almost at solistice here, so it never gets fully dark, when we landed this morning at 2:30 the sun leered like a bleery drunken eye similar to my own. It's kind of a cool hotel, it's on a lake where seaplanes take off and land every five minutes; a feature that is much cooler after 2 pm, not so cool at 7:30 am. they sometimes seem about to crash into the window of the restaurant, the first time it happened I nearly flung my coffee in an attempt to get away. Better now...

Cathy over at Sunday Morning Coffee pointed out I've been linked as part of cult supporting Ann Coulter. Since I've always wanted to be part of a cult, this is pretty cool. Whenever they picked cults in high school, I was always picked last and I ended up being in what I called cults of one. sigh. I appreciate the link, but I'm not really an Ann coulter nut, I like her, she's quick witted and funny, and speaks the truth without a coating of political correctness. But I've only read her books for free in Barnes and Noble, I haven't bought one yet. That seems to be one problem with the left, is once you say a position like 'I don't think George Bush is the antichrist', they come back with "you're a dupe and/or a fool' and label you a "bushie". I've evolved over 6 years to where I am a bushie now. If it's a choice between being a bushie or a leftist nutjob, me llamo "Bushie". So I say that I sort of agree...

I just tried to find the Marine Hadji girl video on Youtube, but it's already been taken down. I agree with Mike's take on the subject over at Cold Fury: This is a pretty tame little song compared to some of the rap stuff I’ve heard and they all get their panties in knots over it. Funny thing, I haven’t ever heard them get wound up over the fabulous jihadi videos - you know them, dude screaming as some other dude slices off his head, the slicer screaming Allahu Akbar as loud as he can. Nope, some marine making a tasteless (go figure - young men and marines aren’t tasteful - never would have guessed that) video and posting it. And of course this is the worst thing to ever happen. Again - bite me. This is the most blatant and extreme double-standard existant ever. The US military has to meet a standard (created by the press so they may look as shocked as possible) that King Arthur and every knight of the Round Table, combined - including Ivanhoe and Richard the Lion-Heart...

I don't normally admit to my problem, but since I saw a column by Mary Mapes (of CBS fame) where she said: When our story aired on September 8, 2004, it was savaged in an unprecedented outpouring of political vitriol. The Bush administration was then at the height of its ability to summon a terrifying whirlwind of criticism from right wing bloggers, hate talk radio yackers, FOX News "reporters," conservative columnists, and those hollering people whose heads always appear in little boxes on cable discussion shows. None of these critics cared anything about the facts of the story, only about their politics. Yes, it's true, I'm under the control of the dark lord, George Bush. Here's a candid photo from when he appears in my living room to summon me to my blogging duty. You haven't lived until you've heard your own voice amplified through your own 6 speaker surround sound, saying "yes, my master". Since I don't work for HAL, I don't g...

Jerry Pournelle links to an article from the Guardian in England about an interview with Ann Coulter. (Every week Dr. Pournelle has a correspondent in England that sends an email chock full of good links.) Even though the intervierwer doesn't like her, Ann Coulter comes across as smart and funny and it's still worth a read. ...After we've ordered our drinks, I ask Coulter whether she thinks she owes her success to a conservative following, or to liberals' need for a bogeyman. 'Oh, that's a good question,' she chuckles. 'One of my favourite liberal friends has laughed about how it's just like clockwork: they attack you, and all it does is give you publicity, and they can't help themselves - they just keep attacking. Liberals hate me because I understand them better than they understand themselves. They pretend not to get the joke.' As the first plane went into the World Trade Centre, Coulter was in a cab on her way to LaGuardia airport. Sh...

In a post titled "Pedacaris alive or Raisuli dead" Wretchard at the Belmont club lays out reality for those who would complain about the US 'assassinating' Zarqawi, or that perhaps torture was used to obtain the information. (go read it all, but here is a money shot) The interesting thing about the Zarqawi case is that it allows one to examine the effect of necessity over law in an actual case. There's no need for a hypothetical like "what if you could save Europe by targeting Hitler?" or "what if you could save the lives of hundreds of children by torturing a terrorist?" In this case the hypothetical is actual. This has the effect of inverting the roles of the principles on trial. Would it be justified not to resort to unlimited measures in order to hunt down a person responsible for killing thousands of individuals? Can one ever allow a person like Zarqawi to live a single day more knowing that hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents w...

It's probably a sin to celabrate over the death of anyone, even your enemy, but screw it, yeeeaaaaaaahhhhhh! General Casey said an American air strike had targeted "a single dwelling in a wooded area surrounded by very dense palm forest" eight kilometers, or five miles, north of the city of Baquba, and that "precision munitions" had been used, a phrase that usually refers to laser-guided bombs or missiles. An unconfirmed report on Iraq's state-owned television channel, al-Iraqiya, said the attack had been carried out by American attack helicopters. Mr. Zebari said the American military had been following Zarqawi "very closely" in recent weeks. He said Zarqawi had been vulnerable ever since he had lost his refuge in Anbar province, which is largely in the hands of Sunni insurgents. "He had been forced out of Anbar" after Sunnis there "joined hands with their Iraqi brothers," Mr. Zebari said. Fuller details of the raid were expect...

A story on CTV shows that it is much more difficult to cross from Canada to the US, the CTV reporter was stopped at the border, and the crew's id's were seized. The problem was all their equipment that was previously allowed through, now it's not allowed in with the same forms. Hurray for bureaucracy!

I'm watching the local news here in Calgary, something you couldn't make me do at home, and they seem to think the near terrorist attack isn't that serious. They are covering it nonstop for a good chunk of the 1/2 hour show, but more like observers from another planet instead of covering a near-miss. Chuckling at how the international press is so interested in their peaceful country. A lot of interviews with "this is canada, not Guantamano bay, these boys have rights" [paraphrase] demanding that the suspects be allowed to pray together. 'Or we don't need more security here in parliament, I feel perfectly safe.' It looks to me like the canadians were very lucky. The alleged terrorists were stopped buying the ammonium nitrate and they wanted a ton, which is the same size as the OKC bomb. Traffic can still approach parliament, to the point that a hijacked bus rolled onto parliaments front lawn last year. They could have detonated a truck bomb, then r...

The London Times might have retracted their photo with it's slanderous implication that Marines murdered the Iraqis in the photo, but their attack is beginning to bear fruit. That photo is beginning to be picked up by the press as representative of what happened in Haditha, the same way Abu Graib is shown as the one guy on a box with fake electrodes, instead of the 10's of thousands murdered by Saddam Hussein. Now Haditha is this: Which is really ironic, because this is a scene of murder by insurgents. The press never gets the story right. Abu Graib was a place where Saddam murdered by the truckload, but the story the press covered is where a few idiots without adult supervision did things to the prisoners that people in houston pay money for. Now fast forward to today, the insurgents kill every day dozens of people, and a photo that should represent this tragedy is used to tar the Marines before they get their day in court. Who are these reporters, cartoonists and editors? ...

I'm out of class and back in the hotel room and I'm live blogging deal or no deal. I like the show normally, especially on Tivo, but tonight they're giving away up to 5 million dollars. There's 10 spots left on the board, and celine dion is floating like an animated head from futurama on a video screen next to the contestant's family members. It's all luck, the only skill is to stop playing but since most people are degenerate gamblers and will keep playing until they lose all, most people won't win the maximum. Unless you're willing to go to the mat and the last case, the most you can win is half of the max. It's a lot like most decisions in life where you really can't know the real economics and how much you can save or earn, like buying a car or selling a house, just more randomized and with hotter women. [A frequent commercial break includes a calgary news story that half of the terrorists arrested last week were trained locally in canada...

I just arrived in Calgary for a training seminar after a four hour flight in a middle seat, with an extra hour tacked on due to smoke emanating from a landing gear wheel. I felt like Bill Cosby's comedic dental patient;" 'moke? 'ere's 'moke unda da plane?" But not panicking because I can see the gate, and the law says you can't burn up in a plane if you can see the gate. But, instead of driving the last 300 yards to the gate the pilot stopped to wait for the fire trucks, who burst out of the fire station like this was the first excitement in months, which it probably was. Our super informative pilot then told us that the fire department didn't want to spray the wheel, they wanted to bring out a fan to cool it. Another 15 hot minutes while they dragged out a 1/4 mile extension chord. or maybe just setup the fan or something. They then detected a fluid leaking out of the landing gear, so the pilot shut down the engines and the air conditioning, a...

When my brother and I would fight as children, my mother would admonish us with "it's gonna end bad", about 15 seconds before it ended badly, with me running off crying because my brother is 6 years older than me and he'd regularly beat my ass. (except the time that I broke his arm with a chair. Sorry, bro) I thougt of this today because Michele Malkin was kind enough to link to me for the story below pointing out that the times of london was using a picture for the Haditha story from a set of photos where insurgents had killed several dozen Iraqis. I thought it was fairly straight forward illustration of the slanted press, eg. you'd never see a non-conservative newspaper 'accidentally' printing a picture of happy iraqis. But whatever. I'm worried that it is going to end bad because it is now almost impossible to have a civil discourse about anything in this country. I point out an obvious to me case of slanted press, and several people make commen...

There's not much actual information out in the press about what really happened in Haditha, but most of what has come out is highly slanted against the marines. The only data point I've seen is an interview with the lance corporal who survived the initial IED explosion. Here's a summary of the interview here: (RHCP) (video here ) Again, here's a summary of the salient facts that Crossan related: 1) The Marines knew there was going to be an attack on the command outpost, which would explain the high degree of suspicion about the Iraqi's in a taxi that first refused to stop, then ran away from them. 2) There was an IED attack on his humvee, and a squad was sent in 3) Insurgents began firing on the Marines almost immediately. 4) He's not claiming to have witnessed anything. The first slant that has already been pointed out in several places (hotair), is in the times online from london, where they grabbed one quote from Corporal Crossan , “were blinded by ha...