Far South of I-10

Airlines suck, Orbitz.com...edited

2010-09-04T19:07:00.000-07:00

[this is edited from the original post, orbitz saw this post
and commented, then responded by email with a voucher and an apology,
which was nice of them]

Orbitz.com is crap and should be shunned. (what's the hypertext
for shunning?) They added travel insurance to a ticket I bought
($40!), it must have been opt in because I certainly didn't click
no travel insurance (sic). Then, the return ticket is non-changeable
after flying the first leg. If I were an honest person and writing
the fare rules, I'd put that first, before the "changeable with a fee"
line. screw them, I break with thee, here's some dog poopoo for your shoes.

Continental.com's website was written by teenagers. it blows up when
I use a credit card with an italy address, when I used a card that still
has an american address it appeared that it bought the ticket, giving a message
that the return leg hasn't been ticketed because it's on a partner, but
in reality none of it was ticketed because the credit card was declined
due to suspected fraud (BofA sucks too), but Continental's crap website
didn't say that, it gave a confirmation number and it looked like the
ticket was there.

Of course when my family tried to travel on that ticket, there was no ticket,
never purchased, declined. They ended up traveling on cash on hand, piggy
banks and borrowed money. While I was alternately calling bofA and continental
trying to figure out what was going on, the receipt for the ticket from
continental drifted down like snow into my in box. What the hell.

I finally downloaded skype so I had a phone that could call 1800 numbers
for free (no iguana needed) but I had no headphones and had to spend a
morning shouting into my keyboard trying to shout at continental and
BofA. (their answer, we're sorry but fuck off)

So to recap, I'm an idiot for not calling and confirming tickets, but I have
an excuse, I was traveling in a foreign land where my cell phone connects via
iguana. ~~Orbitz sucks and it will be a cold day in hell before I use them again.~~
Continental sucks and their website sucks, but until KLM starts flying more
in the western hemisphere we're screwed.

Edited with strikethroughs. added this rant:

I think there's a business opportunity for a travel agent that handles travel, hotels and taxi's. Corporate travel departments do such a poor job of buying tickets that I tend to go online and find them myself and buy them, but if you call the airlines they charge $20 for the call. If I was running an airline, rather than screwing customers out of $50 for a bag to improve profitability, I'd be stealing customers by waving the bag fee if you show the competitor's elite card, and instead of charging
to call for a ticket, sell-up while you've got a customer on the phone.

Anyway, there's a gap between on the web retailers and walk-in travel agents that sell tours and cruises.

Katrina Revisited

2010-08-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

We're in the New Orleans area for a few days and
it's the 5th anniversary of Katrina. We didn't see
much riding through town, it looks like NO east is still
pretty beat up looking though.

Watching the coverage of Katrina from a local news perspective
made me go back to see what I wrote at the time, and it made
me think I would have done a better job as governor or mayor
than those dodos did.

Mayor Nagin just ordered a mandatory evacuation, by
reading the legaleze version of the order instead of saying
more plainly it is time to leave, and if you don't leave no
one will come rescue you.

Hopefully it wasn't poorly executed and too late.

Governor blanco just mentioned that President Bush called to
make sure there was a mandatory evactuation.

She keeps mentioning being blessed, and she keeps repeating
herself and mentioning flying in and looking at the traffic.
Instead of a governor she is really just a traffic reporter
and a bad one at that.

I voted for Bobby Jindal, and I wish that fast talking guy had
won.

Airport floor blogging

2010-08-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'm traveling from europe back to the western hemisphere
and my laptop's battery died. There are power plugs in one
of the houston terminal b corridors of despair, but non are
near a chair so I must sit indian style on the ground, looking
like an unjolly budda.

I did miss a flight yesterday and get stuck in Rome. The
other option was waiting six hours then flying standby to spend
the night in Newark. I skipped the standby and stayed in Rome.
I did a nice hike from the Vatican to the Pantheon, then
through all the fori and all the way south to somebody's bath
(caracella? pretty impressive ruins of a giant bathhouse)

Moving on up

2007-04-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

I'm changing URL's for this blog, I started to when
we moved to colombia, but I never really have time.

Please update your links.

http://farsouthofi-10.blogspot.com/

Let us drink, let us sing, let us for one more night spit in the face of death!

2007-04-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Another flowchart today from Achewood.
Any time a cartoon includes a flowchart spitting in the face
of death, you gotta love it. (pretty uneven cartoon, though,
but when the topics range from lying robots to gay porn, ya
gotta expect that.

It could be eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow some
crazy korean kid could blow us all away!

Solar power putz's

2007-04-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Nytimes has an article today about how solar power still doesn't
make economic sense. They use an example for a house with a system
that costs $54000, which to me seems excessive. The only way solar
power will make sense for anyone is to first cut down the demand side
of the equation, you can't solar power conventional air conditioning!

I took a class a few years ago on designing and installing PV systems,
and I learned from that class that it is possible to either be a shark
and screw people out of a lot of money and sell them things they don't
need, or you have to live like the instructor did, in a crappy 30 year old
camper. The 3rd way to live would probably entail me continuing to work
in the oilfield while selling PV on weekends.

To me, the people that installed a $54000 system are sharks. A rule of
thumb would guestimate a pv system costing $15/watt installed. So a $54000
system would be a 3.5 kilowatt system, and if New Jersey gets 4-5 usable
hours of sunlight per day, then they would generate about 505 kwh/month,
to try and meet the demands of a macmansion.

The better way that makes economic sense is to cut back on electricity usage,
use gas for heating, cooking and drying. Then replace all lights with florescents
that it's possible to put up with, then cut out all the thief loads and turn off
TV's, vcr's and computers that aren't in use with powerstrips. Every watt
you save on load saves you $15.

In New Jersey you could probably live without air conditioning, in Houston,
not so much. In order to try and be green in Houston you'd really need a
ground loop heat pump, which is probably the most cost effective thing
to do in areas that need aircon.

The ideal isn't just to spend money to propitiate the green gods [A la al gore]
or to live in caves without internet, but to sensibly cut back and save energy and
money, then put up a PV system that will cover the load.

Here's your sign.

2007-04-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

Bill Whittle at Eject,Eject, Eject has a fantastic post rebutting conspiracy theories
that is like a cool wind blowing through a teenagers fetid bedroom,
his post has the cleansing power of logic to sweep away the augean
stables of stupidity that infests the modern world.

My favorite quote:

ALL of these 9/11 conspiracy sites have museum-grade idiots stating what “obviously” happens at velocities and temperatures that they are flat-out incapable of understanding. Not only are these people too stupid to understand the physics involved with what they are bloviating about…they are too stupid to realize that they are too stupid.

Too many people believe the conspiracy theories in the world today.
They use magical thinking instead of logic and science, which tells me that
when the world crashes some day, it'll be hundreds of years before it gets
back to the same level again since society is currently dismembering the
enlightenment structure that got us to this point, we're racing back to the
16th centry "if she weighs the same as a duck she's a witch" logic.

There are people that hold the stupidest viewpoints about things they know
nothing about:

Fire can't melt steel. The government is an evil nazi dictatorship, let's go
protest and shit on a flag trusting the same nazis to not arrest us. Iran is
a haven of democracy. Russia, france and china have the world's best interest
at heart, the USA only acts for the benefit of oil companies. Iraq is a war
for oil where we're willing to spend trillions of dollars just so that someday
we'll have the right to buy oil at market price.

Bill Whittle says all this a lot better than I ever could, he hits the truthers with
shotgun blasts of reality, too bad they are too deranged to read it.
I'm going to print and laminate his post to show it to people as soon
as the first flecks of foam appear on their lips; here stupid, here's your sign.

Sounds from the window

2007-03-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

In our apartment we have a balcony that opens up to what should be
a side street, but since the next street over has become a major traffic
jam, our quiet street seems to get louder every day. Car alarms, traffic,
the rattle of trucks filled with propane bottles, it all fills the street.

Stranger still is the sound of horseshoes, since a major mode of garbage
removal is horse drawn wagons. Most garbage is picked up by modern
trucks a few times a week, but the horse drawn wagons pass every few
hours and pick up things of value like cardboard boxes, or appliances,
or an american flag that my wife tried to throw out. (I had to explain that
it's not junk no matter how fucked up looking it is, we need to burn it
during a barbeque after I rescued the flag from the trash.)

In the mornings on the weekends there is a tamale vendor that walks the
streets, "Tamales, tamales, tamales" she cries, and it's more stretched out
than the tamale vendors in the apartment where I lived in 2000, so instead
of "tamales, tamales, tamales" it's really more of a "ta-ma-les" over 5 seconds
in a high pitched voice.

There is also the sound of the bar a block away at night. I've got speakers
on the patio now so I'm tempted to try and fight their salsa with some high
volume eagles tonight. or maybe not.

Until we have actual curtains on the windows this place seems very similar
to a fishing camp I lived in back in '94-'96. Very open to the world. I can't fish
here, but I can drink beer on the porch.

thanatopsis

2007-03-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

It's pretty depressing that at some point most of the blogosphere will
be nothing but dead links and dead people. As my bookmarks such
as Cathy Seip and Acidman pass away, the internet will become another
tomb of man.

As William Cullen Bryant said:

...The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man! with a modern update: The links and banner ads, porno and erection aids Arguments over politics and religion, cutting wit and sock puppets, bloggers and MSM fill this internet, this google cache, the darkening web

bleh. old age

2007-03-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

I'm just waiting out the last couple of hours before I turn
40. In an optimistic way of looking at things, I've probably
got another half-life left to go. Less optimistic way of looking
at things gives me 20 - 25 effective years before I retire
to the couch full time. Since I've only got 17 years professional
work experience, I still have more ahead of me than behind
me. (not sure if that's optimistic or not, I think I'd rather retire
now)

Who knows? maybe in 40 years aging will be conquered, and
I'll live long enough to see all the rich and famous people get
treatments that keep them young forever and I'll shake my
diet bud can at the HD hologram set as Paris reenacts her
sex tape live on CBS for the 50th anniversary of it being released
on the internet. As my palsied liver-spotted hand stabs at the
tivo button, tivo will reach into my blogspot archive and bring out
this post and I'll get the satisfaction of knowing I was right about
the future before I have to get up to get another diet bud and change
my depends.

Bush is here

2007-03-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

We're in Bogota and George Bush arrived this morning. He's having
lunch now at Casa Narino where President Uribe lives. The airport is pretty
much shut down this afternoon and the normal opening of the streets to
pedestrians and bicycles is canceled today so we're just huddling down
in the apartment with delivery pizza. The cnn ticker occasionally flashes
that colombian police are battling protesters, but the local news isn't saying
anything about that, who knows what that means.

Lots of police sirens in the distance, I hope they are just leading the president
to safety.

From El tiempo:

La Policía Metropolitana informó que algunos alborotadores trataron de tomarse la estación de TransMilenio de la Avenida Caracas a la altura de la calle 34, zona donde fueron atacados algunos comercios y sucursales bancarias.

Los disturbios se produjeron tras un mitin de protesta por la visita, convocado por la Gran Coalición Democrática, convergencia de centrales sindicales, partidos políticos de oposición y movimientos de estudiantes y campesinos.

Unas 1.500 personas lanzaron arengas contra la visita de Bush y más de veinte banderas de Estados Unidos fueron quemadas en la plazoleta de La Macarena, en el centro de Bogotá.
[protesters tried to take the bus station, and they attacked businesses and banks the protest was led by varios commie pinkos and poor country people. 1500 people harranged the president and 20 us flags were burnt.
Bogota is laid out on a grid, from south to north, east to west, the government is near Calle 0, streets south of that increment and are called "calle # south", streets north of that increment and are just called Calles, the north south streets start at 0 up against the mountains, and increment to the west. The protests were at Septima & Calle 34, or 30 blocks north of Casa Narino and 70 blocks south of here.]

So the protests were about 70 blocks away from here, and if there were only 1500 people out of a city of 6,000,000 people, it's really not a big turnout. I don't know what they are protesting, cnn showed a grafiti of "yankee go home", and it sounds like if the democratic congress gets it's way, the US will cut aid and leave. Which is a shame since conditions are so much better here since the "plan colombia" was started by Clinton, without US help Los FARC will be back again with the support of Chavez in Venezuela.

Eat some peanut butter

2007-03-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

I love the comic
achewood, I only
saw it last week
when lileks pointed
it out, but there are
years online with
a pull-down that lets you
choose different story
arcs. It's kind of
funny strange and
funny haha at the
same time.

This one really hit the nail on the as far as depression
goes, when a good objective for the day is to eat some
goddamn peanutbutter.

Support the troops redux

2007-02-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

I'm in quito for work and I'm stuck in the hotel
room because I've picked up some kind of stomach
virus that won't go away. All I've done for the past
24 hours is migrate from the computer to the bed
to the bathroom, so I got to watch about 15 hours
of TV yesterday. One of the expat channels is showing forrest
gump this week, so I settled down to watch forrest and bubba
discuss boiled shrimp fried shrimp, shrimp sandwich, etc.

One scene that particularly jarred me was the peace protest
rally, where they are protesting Fucking VIETNAM!

The big banner behind the podium says "Support our GI's,
bring them home". Which makes me wonder if the hippies even
spent money to reprint signs for this war, or they are using the
same ones.

Iraq and Vietnam are similar in that the roots of both wars are
deep. There were several points in time before ground troops were
in vietnam where we could have changed policies, not returned indo
china to france after WWII, not supported the french, not supported
the South Vietnamese and just washed our hands of the whole thing.

Once ground troops were there and it was a proxy war with the Soviet
Union it had morphed from a colonial war that was a bad idea to an
anti-domino war where the country did have something at stake. The
troops should have been supported by silence, not protests.

The Iraq war is similar in that it is a continuation of the first gulf war where
only a cease-fire was signed way back in 1991 on condition that Saddam
give a full accounting of it's wmd and destroy all of it, not fire missiles at
coalition aircraft, etc (resolutions 686 and 687) The cease fire was signed
after the first bush decided not to go on and attack bagdad and topple
saddam.

The roots go even further back because we gave support to Iraq against
Iran, when we probably should have been bombing both combatants, or at
least not talking to either one. This led to our ambassador telling the Iraqis
'we have no opinion with arab-arab conflicts like your border disagreement
with the Kuwaitis'. (that's the text of the conversation between Saddam and
Ambassador Gilespie- fascinating)

So my point is, if I have a point, both wars had deep roots that go back in time.
The final decisions were made to send in ground troops, and after that point
we are stuck like a fly in amber. As mortals we can't go back in time and change
any of the events that happened in the past. We are there, the troops are fighting.
We can either support them by sending money or packages, we can work hard
so that the economy stays strong, we can strap on bombs and fly to Iran and blow
ourselves up over there (maybe not), but protesting the war and demanding
the troops come home is not support and never has been, in this war or in
past wars.

Cien anos de soledad

2007-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I've felt weirded out this past week, apart from
too much work and not enough time to do it is that I'm reading 'One-
hundred years of solitude' by the colombian author Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. I tried to start reading it in spanish, but it is so different and
weird that my first reaction was 'fuck, my spanish must really suck, because
I don't have any idea what he's talking about.' So I bought the english
version instead and it really is a fantastic book, in every sense of the word
fantastic. It follows 5 generations of the Buendia family and it rings so
true at the same time that every almost single event that happens in it
is false and magical, the story is told in the past fantastical tense.

Everything that happens could be a later mythical interpretation of past events,
instead of a town being built because a group of young couples are moving
away from their parents after one of the men kills a rival, instead they
leave because the ghost of the dead man is haunting his killer. More things
happen in the first 60 pages of this book than any two other books, it's like
the Anti-tom clancy, instead of 800 pages of nothing followed by 100 pages
of climax, it's several hundred pages of climax.

The book comes out the pages and infects your life so that sentences run
on and become paragraphs, paragraphs blow up into pages and pages fly away
into books, all of which makes it difficult to finish the technical proposals I'm
writing. Cien anos de propuestas technicas.

I hate it when that happens

2007-02-23T23:26:00.000-08:00

Do you ever travel to a different city and go to one of those
places...what's it called? oh yeah, a casino, and you play craps for
about 4 hours and lose $100 in a slow unfun kind of way while
drinking what do you call them? oh yeah, cuba libres, then you get
get tired of losing so you go over to the $5 baccarat table even though
you don't know the rules, but it's really pretty easy so you play and
you win back your money plus another $50.

Then you go back to your room and turn on the tv and they have what's it
called? oh yeah, the wizard of oz with Pink floyd's dark side of the moon
dubbed over it, and it plays and it plays and it seems to fit so perfectly that
you realize that pink floyd, the people that wrote the wizard of oz and the
guy that dubbed the movie with the album are all doing you know, what's that
called? oh yeah....serious drugs. Man, I hate it when that happens.

[dorothy is just meeting the scarecrow, and "dark side of the moon" is
playing -roger waters is saying "the lunatic is on the grass" just as the
scarecrow jumps out] no more cuba libres for me.

Going Tharn

2007-02-18T05:42:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy lately that this morning I'm actually tharn.
Like a rabbit being stalked by a coyote, or a manager stalked
by too many employees, I'm laying in the grass with my ears flat
against my head as snowflakes of emails drift down around me
and the buzzing cricket of my cellphone rings incessantly.

Should I dash for the warren, just shut down my rabbit computer and
leave the crickett where it lies, vibrating?

Unfortunately, I'm in the warren, it's sunday morning and the oilfield
is calling me here at home....shit, no more rabbit metaphors.

72 Virgins

2007-02-11T06:59:00.000-08:00

Steve Martin has a great blurb in the New Yorker called
72 Virgins. Linked from Instapundit, since I'm so busy lately the
only web surfing I do is check LGF and instapundit to see what's
going on in the world. It's sunday, so I read the Nytimes & times
picayune too, yeah!

Here's the 20's, I hope bin ladin is enjoying his 72 Virginians:

Virgin No. 21: I hope you’re not going to sleep with me and then go sleep with seventy-one others.

Virgin No. 22: Do you mind if we listen to Mannheim Steamroller?

Virgin No. 23: Are you O.K. with the dog on the bed?

Virgin No. 24: Would you mind saying, “Could I see you in my office, Miss Witherspoon?”?

Virgin No. 25: Ride me! Ride me, Lucky Buck!

Virgin No. 26: You like your vanilla hot?

Virgin No. 27: Does Ookums like Snookums?

Virgin No. 28: It’s so romantic here, dead.

Virgin No. 29: Well, I’m a virgin, but my hand isn’t.

Virgin No. 30: You are in?

Yes, I believe.

2007-01-14T02:14:00.000-08:00

I was almost a teenager before I learned that

"When the Saints come marching in" wasn't just

the new orleans saints theme song. But here it is

anyway. Who Dat!

WHEN THE SAINTS
COME MARCHING IN

We are trav'ling in the footsteps
Of those who've gone before
And we'll all be reunited,
On a new and sunlit shore,

Oh, when the saints go marching in,
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

And when the sun begins to shine
And when the sun begins to shine
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the sun begins to shine

Oh, when the saints go marching in,
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call
Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the trumpet sounds its call

Oh, when the saints go marching in,
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

(dang, I wish I was there in that number)

john bolton on bbc

2007-01-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm in england for a class this month, and John bolton just made an appearance on
bbc. He really pointed out the bias of the bbc, since every question was in the format
of "when did you stop beating your wife?". One question was something like: 3000
american troops have died in Iraq, how many more will have to die before Bush admits
his mistake?

John bolton fired back and mopped the floor for any fair-minded person watching.
With silver mustache flashing, he responded to one jab about how the Iraq war
has increased terrorism, Mr bolton shot back 'just the same way that combat
with japan increased after america responded to pearl harbor'. heh.

Squeemishness and outsourcing

2006-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

We're homeless again, our apartment that we've bought is still
undergoing a makeover, and the owner of the apartment that
we were renting finally noticed we were renting a nice apartment
with no rental agreement, and at half the price they should be
asking just because they are nice. Niceness apparently ended
this week, they dumped a 20 page rental agreement with price
hike and lease on on us, and we decided to take a hike and stay
with friends for a week or two until the floor is done in the new
place.

One result of that is that I can't watch CNN or fox or bbc, because
they only seem to be talking about Saddam, and a video of saddam's
tongue sticking out as he's hanged isn't something our host's little
boys need to see at their age. They can read about him in 10 years
in their history books, as a great leader who sponsored national kite
flying contests, and the imperialist americans removed him from power
because he wouldn't sign our haliburton contracts. Or something equally
muddle-headed. (hopefully they'll still study history, and not just chant
from the koran)

It's ok to be squeemish and not let little boys see death in slow-mo, but
as adults and free people, squeamishness will be our undoing. This is
war, even if we decide we don't want to fight it, there will still be people
who will come here and fight us until we are either dead or converted, or
they are dead and/or dead.

Mark Steyn says this much better today in the Chicago Sun-times:
(go read the whole thing, this is the climax)

Well, we'll see about that. One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren't fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some "war crime" or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they're just getting on with it.
And, given the potential for Islamist destabilization of their own country, they were wise to do so. The "international community" has reacted in the usual ways: calls for immediate cease-fires so that an ineffectual U.N. force of peacekeepers can go in and enjoy their customary child sex with the locals while propping up the Islamists. The Ethiopians can't be blamed for not taking the U.N. seriously. To be sure, the alternative to the jihad boys is a bunch of thugs. But that's the reality of much of the map today: a choice between being an outpost of the global jihad, or a patchwork quilt of warlords, or a bit of both with some feeble, half-hearted multilateral force mediating between the two. I don't know whether the Ethiopian intervention will work in the long run, but, if it does, the best hope for squashing the jihad might be to outsource the fight to Third World regimes less squeamish about waging it.

I'm afraid we're looking at one of the worst possible outcomes, limping along
in Iraq, burning up the army while the media chants our demise. At every stage
of the war, we've tried to be nice, targeting palaces with smart bombs instead of
carpetbombing, negotiating with people like Sadr instead of connecting the words
bullet and head, and chatting with the Iranians while their factories turn out IED's
in three shifts.

Nice hasn't worked and we are basically waiting for the Iranians to build a bomb,
or the pakistanis to give a bomb(or bombs) to whichever nutjobs are finally going
to attack us. Being nice and squeamish will probably cost us a few cities, and in the
end cost the other guys a whole lot more. We need to stand up now, roll back
the sadrists and whichever other bad guys choose to stand up in Iraq, roll back
the Iranian nuclear program and the syrian infiltration program, and do it in a non-
squeamish way that doesn't try and deliver a message...but kills the bad guys.

Or outsource the whole thing to someone willing to do what needs to be done.

Traveling man

2006-12-26T17:13:00.000-08:00

Kottke.org links to a meme about listing the cities you've visited this
year. Since I did quite a bit of traveling this year I thought I'd give
it a try:

New Orleans, LA*
Baton Rouge, LA
Picayune, MS*
Lafayette, LA*
Anchorage, Alaska*
Liberal, KS
Oklahoma City, OK
Tulsa, OK
Cameron, LA
Los angeles,CA
Long Beach, CA*
Bakersfield,CA
Denver,Co*
Airdrie, Canada
Banff, Canada
Calgary, Canada*
Villahermosa, MX
Coatzacoalcos, MX
Agua Dulce, MX
Mexico City, MX
Edmonton,Ca
Austin, TX
Miami, Fla
Paris
Milan
Venice
Florence
Rome
Seattle
Salt Lake City
Lima, Peru*
Quito, Ecuador*
Bogota,Colombia*
Paipa, Colombia
Chia, Colombia*

That's 11 States and 6 foreign countries. I'm glad to have
seen most of those places, but Liberal, Kansas I could have done
without. I probably spent the most time in Calgary, Quito & Anchorage
apart from Bogota and Houston where we lived this year. My favorite
place was Paris, maybe florence too, but those were on vacation. I can't
picture having enough money to live in Paris without making an hour
long commute by train every day. I think I liked Anchorage the most
for a work destination, I liked the food and the people are uniformly
nice.

I travel a lot, but I'm not good at having fun on expenses, so I'd rather
be at home with my wife and the Tivo.

Christmas in Quito

2006-12-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

One of my cowworkers had vacation scheduled over christmas so I had
to come over to quito to relieve him, which meant canceling our weekend
trip to visit the inlaws. (oh the pain). Quito isn't a bad tourist city, it's got
the 'mitad del mundo' museum where we saw the effects of the coriolis force
with water swirling counterclockwise on one side of the equator, and
clockwise on the southern side. Then I balanced an egg on the end of a
nail, and shot a blowgun at a cactus. All pretty entertaining stuff for a 12
year olds. These events took place on the actual equator, instead of the pretend
where the mitad del mundo monument sits.

For Christmas, south americans celebrate on christmas eve, with a late dinner, then opening presents at midnight. Since we couldn't eat until 10pm we needed a way to spend a couple
My wife and I took a tour around Quito's churches, and we also went up
to see the statue of the Virgin, which for christmas became part of what must
be the worlds largest nativity scene.

The statue 2nd from the right is about 90' tall, the
other figures are constructed from christmas lights.
Pretty cool I thought. We opened our presents, and
my wife cunningly wrapped just the remote from
my new tivo that she bought me...whoohoo!

Titanic and class struggles

2006-12-18T04:59:00.000-08:00

We stayed up watching Titanic last night on Fox. My wife couldn't sleep
so she watched it to try and fall asleep, I stayed up watching it initially to see
if they'd show breastage on Fox in south america(they did), but since I really can't go to
sleep in mid sinking, I stayed up until 3:30 too to watch Leo float away.
I'm paying for it now though.

I wonder what the locals here think of that movie and the class structure it
shows from England and even America at that time. Class still applies in
the US, on airplanes, getting into good universities, gated communities, etc,
but no upper-class person would ever say that to a lower class person, they'd
probably get punched in the face at best, more likely a 9mm gat would be
pushed down their throat.

Here in colombia it's very different, rich people here seem to assume that the
poor will kowtow down, tug a forelock, say "si jefe", to every stupid comment.
On sundays I'm typically out and about wearing the official gringo uniform of
jeans and white tennis shoes, so I get a lot of faces from 60 year old matrons
who expect not to see that sort of thing outside of their gardeners.

In the office, the titles of "jefe" and "ingeniero" are used as marks of respect,
but also with the downcast head of someone who thinks their job and their family's food
could be taken away on the whim of some asshole boss. There are cleaning women
who will bring in coffee after carrying it up three stories (no elevator) and think
that is their lot in life. They also bring their daughters to work, not to see their job
but to start working in the career that will be theirs for life...cleaning.

No one here seems to tell their children "you can grow up to be president", that
job seems to circulate amongst just a few families with money power and connections.

For all the obvious class structure, the people here are very hard working. If they
haven't graduated from a university they are going at night after working all day.
They don't waste their money on taxi's when they can take a two hour long bus ride.
If I try to get to the office first and leave last, there is always someone there earlier
and someone leaving later. Colombia seems like the US in the early 20th century,
hard working, with a class structure still defined by birth and not credit report. I bet
this will be an even more interesting place in 30 years.

Who Dat!

2006-12-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

I stayed up to watch the Saints win last night, and since Colombia
is on eastern standard time I was torn between wanting the Saints
to score more points against Dallas, or taking a knee like they did
so that the game would end and I could go to sleep before midnight.

The game was on ESPN here, but the announcers overdub in Spanish
and they never sound very excited, much the same way announcers
in english call a game of soccer. [The simpson's episode where springfield
has a boring soccer game that ends in a riot showed that best, "he
kicks the ball...then the other guy kicks the ball...then the third guy
kicks the ball, etc"] I tried picking the game up on internet radio, the
announcers on WWL don't make any pretence of partiality and it's pretty
traditional to turn off the idiots on national tv and turn up Jim Henderson
& Archie Manning on WWL. (maybe it's Hokie Gajan now?) Apparently
licensing restrictions prevent internet radio outside the US. Sucky.

The announcers weren't that bad even in spanish. When someone breaks
away for a touchdown they say: "debe a montar su bicicleta" instead of
"he better get on his horse and ride" to catch up. They keep all the city
and personnel names anglicized, but they change all the nicknames to spanish,
so it was the Vaquerros contra los Santos. oh well...

I was born the same year as the Saints in 1967, so every year since
I could remember I thought "this could be the year that we go to
the superbowl". This year it is definitely doable, the team's fate
is in their hands, if they keep winning they can earn a first round bye
in the playoffs. Then we won't have to watch Minnesota crush the saints
in a wildcard game (1986?). Or the have the hated Falcons romp over the
Saints in the first playoff game.

So two more wins and they clinch a first round bye. Two more wins after
that and they are in the superbowl. I hope this happens, but I need to
remember the first rule of the Saints Fight club...Don't bet on the saints
to win the fight club, you'll probably lose your ass.

Sing it

2006-11-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Victor Davis Hanson's latest book when I have time
to sit and read something, at the rate I'm reading I can make this
book last all year.

He's got a really great article posted on his blog as he sings the chorus
to the end of the west. If we had fought and lost that might have been
honorable, but it looks suspiciously like the men of realpolit are coming
back to abandon the kurds.

But why would either Damascus or Teheran wish to talk? The answer is plain. The former wants to profess to cool it a bit in destabilizing Iraq in exchange for us turning a blind eye in Lebanon; the latter wants to act like stopping the sending of agents of our destruction into Iraq in exchange for cooling our rhetoric about their bomb. What we would be doing in essence by “dialoguing” is saying to both the democracies in Lebanon and Israel, “Sorry, but we have to find a way out of Iraq, and these fascists will promise to turn away from us if they can turn on you.”
All this is dressed up with realist “maturity” and “concern” but it would be consistent with those who brought us Iran-Contra, aid to both Iran and Iraq in their war, stopping before Baghdad, hugs with the House of Saud that paid money to those who killed Americans, and on and on. If Syria and Iran can be assured of a truce, that we won’t destabilize them at home or stop their adventurism abroad, then they might let us save face in Iraq. That they would ever honor such a deal is absurd, that we would ever believe they would is worse than absurd.

For five long years many of us have praised this administration’s constancy and idealism, in removing the Taliban and Saddam, and then staying on to do the hard, the easily caricatured work of democratization. The liberal hawks have long bailed. The paleos have turned venomous in their criticism. Many of the neo-cons have sought escape by blaming the flawed occupation for ruining their supposedly perfect three-week take-down of Saddam. But there are millions of us still out there who, Jacksonian in spirit, close ranks and will support our troops wherever they are. But we simply cannot ask Americans to die in Anbar province while talking to the Iranians and Syrians who are doing their best through surrogates in killing them.

Playing frogger

2006-11-20T17:11:00.000-08:00

Our apartment
is on one side of
a major street
and my office is
on the other side.
Since it's only a few
blocks I tend to
hoof it over there,
which has the downside
of jaywalking through
heavy traffic with
my heavy-assed
dell m70 laptop.

I try to make it across as fast as I can, but I usually end up
stuck on one of 3 medians. The locals make it across effortlessly,
they walk without fear and without seeming to look. I bet
colombians would rock at the game frogger.

I'll probably get squished to the theme song...wawawawawup!

america alone

2006-11-18T06:11:00.000-08:00

I finally got to finish Mark Steyn's America Alone last night. I put it down
in fear and disgust last week, and finally picked it up to finish it last night.
It's a great book but not a happy read, seeing how it looks like the world will
really go to shit in 30 years just in time for me to be too old to do anything
about it. I'll be 70 years old and the jihadists won't have to bother beheading
me, they can just yank the feeding tube out or whatever.

It looks bleak and the muslims may out procreate us and out convert us
but the clearest answer to me is to say screw you to all political correctness.
We may not be the best culture in the world, but I choose nascar-watching,
barbaque-eating, jambalaya-cooking, rock&roll-listening good ol' redneck
USA over most of the rest of the world. We're not all equally good, there are
right answers to the test and if someone's only answer is to beat their women
and threaten to cut off the pope's head then yes, I am better than them.

Latest from Dan Simmons

2006-11-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

Dan Simmons is a speculative fiction writer who wrote a scary
short story last april and now writes even more indepth explanation
and background in another article that I must have missed a few months
ago, but it got linked from Cold fury today, where their mellow is definitely
harshed today

There's too much information in Mr. simmons' article to try and excerpt
much, but one quote does seem to point out what is happening in the world
today:

Forgetfulness overcomes every successful civilization," writes Lee Harris. That forgetfulness is this: in each era, just when trade and peace and reason and moderation seem most likely to prevail, the opportunity for the zealots to succeed through ruthlessness is at its greatest.

"The result is an unsettling paradox: the more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. There is nothing that can be done to change this fact; it is built into the structure of our world."

Colombian TV & Science fiction

2006-11-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

I took today off work since my wife is running around choosing
wooden flooring to install I took the chance to sit around
reading science fiction and watching TV. My order from
Amazon that I ordered last weekend got here, the most
expensive books ever, since I paid for expedited int'l shipping.
I didn' t think about import duties though...so my $138 dollars in
books turned into $200 with shipping, plus $70 in duties
and sales taxes here. I won't be doing that again. ouch.

I did get the 2nd half of the Barron's spanish course on CD.
I highly recommend the 1st half if you're trying to learn
spanish. I've tried various books and courses but that was
the one that really helped my accent and fluency. To get
to where I can use more than 3 verb tenses I'm doing the
2nd part. I bought another copy of the 1st half for one of my
non-spanish speaking coworkers, since I managed to let my
copy get packed up by the movers with my other spanish
training material. (doh!)

I also got a few books to read for fun, America Alone by
Mark Steyn and A War Like No Other by VDH. My one
fiction purchace was Janissaries by Jerry Pournelle. A
really good Science Fiction novel similar to the old Heinlein
books. Unfortunately, I already finished it and now I feel
like I ate half a krispy creme donut, and I'd like 11 1/2
more.

SoI'm stuck drinking club colombia beer and watching
Sonia Bragga rape Clint Eastwood on Cinemax, but I don't
want use up another of my million dollar books today, I
must save them like day old crispy creme donuts, to be
microwaved and relished with coffee.

Fields of Fire

2006-11-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

James Webb won and the Republicans lost the senate too.
This looks bad to the people that hate us, they don't know how
the US electoral system works, so they're probably waiting for
the president to declare new elections or something. They think
we lost, but it's probably not that bleak.
I'm not that worried about James Webb, I like his writing and
most of views, and trust him to make a good decision when the
time comes. Pelosi and the other leaders are more worrisome,
who knows what pain their stupid statements and actions will
cause 5 years from now.

Ejecting from a cardboard submarine

2006-11-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

Bill Whittle is amazing, just when it seems he's abandoned us
to our fate without comment, he pops back up with an essay
that expresses a lot of things that I wish I could say but don't
have the words for.

He mentions the story of the cardboard submarine that you could buy from
the back of a comic book, this made me chortle because if I made
a list of all the things that I've wanted in my life, from my first
PC to a desire for a Jaguar XJS, probably 20% would be things
that I dreamed of buying from the back of a comic book. X-ray
glasses, or the 400 piece set of army men for only $2.99! But
as Mr Whittle so ably points out, just wishing for plastic crap
from the back of a comic does not a nuclear sub make.

Just visualizing whirled peas does not make for a safer world when
there are people with long knives who wish to see the infidel dead
and their women in burkas. Go read the essay, he blasts holes
in so many stupid ideas that it's too hard to figure out which one
to plagarize. It's the kind of good writing that makes me feel
slightly ashamed that I've left the USA at a time of need. Or maybe
there is no need, if I visualize world peace Los Farc will stay happily
in their mountain hidouts, and they'll dance tralala with their islamofacist
friends. ( maybe they won't and a car bomb will go off a couple of
blocks from here, doh! already happened.)

Cake or Death?

2006-11-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

Dr. Sanity has a great post today using death by chocalate cake
as a metaphor for Saddam's wmd's:

There has always been somthing wrong with the MSM's train of reasoning. First the press persisted in encouraging the delusion that no WMD's or their antecedents were ever found in Iraq and that "Bush lied". Now they want you to believe that Saddam indeed had a detailed and documented program developing WMD's; but that the real problem is that Bush Administration's reckless publishing of the details of that program has facilitated Iran becoming a nuclear power.

I couldn't excerpt the cake recipe part, because when I read it it gave me such
an overwhelming desire for hot cake and icecream that I almost
burst out of the apartment on my way to the store. If I were to post it,
it's too easy here to call for cake "a domicilio" (you can even call for beer
to be delivered here), so go read it yourself, it's too much temptation

That post did hit a memory nerve, discussing wmd's and cake called
Eddie Izzard's comedy routine to mind. While the spanish inquistion
offered death and torture, the Anglican minister offered the options of
cake or death...only the truly stupid choose death....I mean cake!

"If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."

2006-11-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

I wish I had bought Mark Steyn's book "America Alone" before
I moved down here. The number of books in english is pretty
limited, and it certainly doesn't contain any books that I agree
with politically. Mr Steyn has a great column that describes an
interview with George W. Bush

I

n 2020, no one's going to be worrying about which Congressional page Mark Foley is coming on to. Except Mark Foley, who'll be getting a bit long in the tooth by then. But if it really is, as Democrats say, ''all about the future of our children,'' then our children will want to know why our generation saw what was happening and didn't do anything about it. They will despise us as we despise the political class of the 1930s. And the fact that we passed a great prescription drug plan will be poor consolation when the entire planet is one almighty headache.

Go read the column and then vote against your local liberal.

Frustration with the news

2006-11-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of watching various groups demanding Donald Rumsfield
quit. Apparently now the Army times is going to add it's voice to the
noise, adding to the constant stream of retired generals saying the
plan was flawed, there weren't enough troops, or boots on the ground,
etc.

The time for those dickheads to speak out was when Rumsfield and
Bush went around the room asking for their opinions. The responsibility
of the generals in charge was, if they didn't agree with the plan, the #
of troops, or the mission, was to resign in protest then speak out. But
do it before the event, not after.

Waiting 3 years until their pension is safe, (what's the pension for an O-8?),
retiring, then saying the plan was flawed does not do us any fucking
good, and if they couldn't speak out for fear of losing $80k per year
against saving thousands of lives, then they should keep their trap
shut now.

Apoyo Technico

2006-10-30T20:05:00.000-08:00

We're finally out of the hotel and in an apartment. We lucked
out and the same people that are selling us an apartment were
willing to rent us their newest apartment for a month until we
close on the piece of junk we're buying and fix it up enough to
live in. (they call condominiums apartments too)

We've got cable tv and internet too now, so I had the joy of
hooking up a new router to a new cable modem. I screwed
something up when I set the mac address to the cable modem
and all I kept getting was the cable companies web page to test
the speed of the modem. With dread yet a small ray of hope
I called tech support, opcion 1 - clientes de red (network), opcion
2 clientes de TVcable, opcion 3 - clientes de negocio. Fuck.
no "oprima dos para ingles" like we hear back home in the multi-
culty USA.

Luckily I've done enough network troubleshooting that I could
follow the steps even though I couldn't quite catch every word.
They reset something and suddenly: bam! Wireless network.
It does prove the point that tests for classes in a foreign language
should be done by telephone. With no hand waving and facial
expressions to provide feedback, it's possible to get lost easily.

Oh well, progress continues.

Car bomb in bogota

2006-10-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

If anyone is curious, we're all ok. There was a car bomb this morning
about a mile from our hotel.

http://www.eltiempo.com/bogota/2006-10-19/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR-3290947.html

It was our friends los farc attacking a military school. No one was killed
thankfully, just six people injured. not for lack of trying though.

Updated later:

This the key part of the el tiempo story:

La Escuela Superior de Guerra está ubicada en el complejo militar del Cantón Norte, donde también se encuentran la Escuela de Infantería y la Universidad Militar Nueva Granada.

En la institución se celebraba un acto académico sobre Derechos Humanos al que estaban invitadas varias personalidades del Estado y la cúpula militar. En el momento de la explosión se encontraba el comandante del Ejército, general Mario Montoya.

"in the moment of the explosion, the commander of the army was there"...so they werent

trying to blow up students, but the commander of the army.

Nyquil Dreams

2006-10-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Bogota after a week of traveling to Quito and Lima
to meet clients and coworkers and people that now work for me.
All I can say is that I'm glad we're going to live here and not Lima,
much of which looks like a run-down version of the model of Tokyo
from Kill Bill 1.

Anyway since I changed from cold to cool to humid and warm yet cool
whenever the wind blows, in 72 hours, I got pretty sick on friday with fever
chills, torrential running nose and a cough suited for "les miserables".
Once I got back here to my ziplock bag full of american medicines, I took
a double dose of Nyquil and went to sleep. (er, passed out, being a Nyquil
veteran, I know enough to take my dose in bed, if you take Nyquil in the
kitchen you may wake up on the kitchen floor.)

I had the most freaked out dreams, I'm not sure if they were all nyquil
related, or just stress. The first set seemed normal...no aliens...but I
apparently got a job as a regional manager for Walmart. In the dream it
seemed like I was in Albequerque from the shape of the mountain that loomed
in the dream. The walmart store was opening and not a single person knew their
job, and when I asked for a diagram of who was in charge, all I got was a list
of names horizontally across the page.

All of this makes perfect sense this morning, since I was supposed to be handing
over with my predecessor over the last week and a half, and he did take me
around and introduce me to all the clients and employees, but everytime we discussed
some facet of the operation he said he'd send me the document by email, or dump
everything onto a common server. I finally asked him to just copy everthing he
was willing to give me onto my external hard drive. When he put me off again I
wasn't sure if he's got a diabolical plan to fuck up my future, or if he's forgetful.
Friday we got through the afternoon and I was pissed off and feverish, still nothing
concrete so I suspected it was the diabolical plan one. Fuck.

Anyway, all of this fed into my Nyquil control center and came out with the first
dream, then a more standard less work involved dream where we were camping
on a bayou being attacked by multicolor alien butterflies and undead rats.
(I know what you're thinking: dream #22)

Drunken public speaking

2006-10-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

We're down here in Colombia, living in a hotel until we can find an
apartment. Living in a hotel always sounds so cool, like being a rich
writer living in a hotel in New York, where the doorman tips his hat
before going up to your four room suite. But living in an actual hotel
room sucks pretty bad, especially when the bed here is nothing like
my memory-foam mattress. (E.T. Voice on/ home, oooouuuch, E.T.
Voice off/)

Work progresses, I've tried not to screw up too many things my first
week, but since the whole job has been 100% in spanish, I think most
people here think I'm a babbling idiot. At the farewell dinner for the guy
I'm replacing I had to stand up and say a few words...unfortunately, with
the altitude my alchohol tolerance is zero here, after two beers and two
glasses of wine over two hours I was halfway to Dean-Martinized. I stood
up, said something in bad spanish and sat down again.

I sat down and immediately panicked and asked my wife, "what did I just say?"
Since no butterknives came sailing back across the table and I wasn't immediately
runoft, I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought, but no more beer in public here.

One job ends, another begins

2006-09-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

I'm just closing out the last issues in my current job before I fly
down to colombia to start a new assignment. It kind of sucks for
things to change, sometimes it would be nice if things could stay the
same, the same boss, same employees, over and over...or maybe it's
better that change happens, I can escape from one job where
everyone says great job but I can see all the things I screwed up
glaring at me every day, and start with a clean slate tomorrow.

Strangely enough, my current job is the one I wanted for years and
years, and now I'm at the point where I'd pay money to be able to stop
doing it. hot damn.

So which is it? Do I want things to stay the same or is this continuously
changing process that is life better? It's really hard to say. I'm like the
monkey that won't let go of a handful of termites to be able to pull it's hand
out of the tree trunk. If I hold on, I can hold dinner in my hand, but if I
let go I can get my hand free.

Oh well. I guess it's time to leave this office and go see what tomorrow holds,
new job, new office, new country, new house.

Who Dat say dey gonna beat dem saints, who dat, who dat!

2006-09-25T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Saint's are getting ready to play, U2 and Greenday are just
starting walking onstage and I really hope the saints win tonight. After all
the years of suffering watching the saints, if ever there was a year
that New Orleans could use a superbowl championship, this is
it. (last year was expecting too much, but this year the story works,
rookie heisman trophy winner...new non-smirking quarterback [boy
I hated to watch Aaron Brooks throw interceptions, then smile.])

here comes bono, let's go Saints!

Steel Beach

2006-09-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

It's pretty cool that Bigelow Aerospace will launch a space
station before the end of the decade. Someone is actually
leading, instead of waiting for moribund nasa to announce
another program that in 15 years will put us back to where
we were 30 years ago.

(above is an image from BA's website of the genesis I)

When I was young I wanted to be an pilot and then
become an astronaut. I never got closer than sitting in an
F-15's cockpit for maintenance purposes and lately it
has seemed like the only people likely to go out into space
will be the chinese. We didn't make space 1999 a reality,
but space 2099 might actually happen with companies like
BA leading the way.

After working offshore in steel vessels for the past 15 years,
I wouldn't want to live in space. I'd like to go for a weekend,
just to see the curve of the earth from space and maybe
have stars in my pockets like grains of sand.

Here's the next pass of genesis I over Katy,TX will be Friday
night, heaven's above is a cool site to figure out ground tracks for objects
in space.

Talk like a pope pirate

2006-09-19T06:13:00.000-07:00

Since today is talk like pirate day, I thought I'd run the pope's
apology through a pirate translator.

The pirate speaks,"Ahoy! Brothers and Sisters, .... At this time, I wish also t' add that I be deeply sorry for t' reactions in some countries t' a few passages o' me address at t' University o' Regensburg, which were considered offensive t' t' sensibility o' Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express me personal thought. "

Movin' on up

2006-09-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back in Houston again, mostly to close out my
current job and put the house on the market. My ever efficient
and lovely wife patricia has already done most of the work of
getting the house organized and ready to be sold, so really
all I did was sign the disclosure agreement and put some
superglue on the broken microwave oven handle.
(This is our second house with a broken handle, am I too
strong or what? ...what)

I'm sort of jet-lagged, hungover and tired, since I ran into
my old roommate from the last time I lived in colombia
in Quito yesterday, and we stayed out drinking until about
an hour before I had to leave for the airport. In my new job
I won't have to travel so much, but since we'll be living in
a foreign country, it'll be more like continuous travel. I may
not be jet-lagged as often either, but I'll probably be in a hung-over
state more often, since the point where I'm almost drunk is
the point where most latinos are just getting warmed up.
Beer is just a warmup for aguardiente, or pisco, or tequila.

what's the old saying "whiskey before beer, never fear"
drink 4 beers then 3 pisco sours...have a miserable flight
back to houston. Oh well, I'll have to do some liver
stretching exercises.

We went out and saw "Gringolandia", which is the zona rosa
in quito...or the tourist nightlife area. I thought...'that's kind
of offensive to name a part of the city making fun of gringos'
until you actually go there and see the places jam packed with
gringos with too much time and too much money.

Oh de wahs

2006-09-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

Sharon has a witty post as usual today, she begins with
a mention of how her Father prounounced hors d' eauvres.
[which reminded me of a friend from high school, when we
were getting the menu prepared for the key club's
senior banquet, he looked at the menu options and said
"What's this whores de erves shit?"] And then her post continues
with art, creation, agony&ecstacy, &etc.

Sharon is fast becoming a professional artist before our eyes,
which is one of the coolest things I've seen on the blogosphere.
From blogging about her kids running around like
hellions, to now blogging about upcoming gallery shows,
soon she'll be blogging about shows in Paris and London,
with her kids running around the louvre like hellions.
(plus ca change, plus ca meme chose)

Anyway, if you arrived here from google because I wrote
titty-bar in a previous post, go visit sharon's store and buy
something there.

Still in Quito

2006-09-13T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of Quito from
a webcam in our office. The
resolution unfortunately isn't
there to show the clouds flowing
like room temperature whip
cream over the top of the
mountain on the right, and
through a valley.

Another feature that didn't come
out is an airplane is landing in the
center-left background. The runway
is pointed almost straight away from the
camera, maybe obliquely to the right.
Right at that mountain. So planes
taking off have to do a maneuver
that takes them up at about a 45 degree angle, or when they land from the south
it looks like a carrier trap. Pretty cool and distracting if you're trying to work
at a desk with this window.

Below is a view from google earth. The red ellipse is where the runway is
a red circle marks the webcams
location. Since the runway almost
lines up with the long axis
of the city, almost anywhere
in the city has a plane flying
over every several minutes.
I'm learning the flight schedule,
since there is a pack of flights that arrive here from 10:20 pm to 11:10 pm.
I don't even bother going to bed until the continental flight arrives.

It's a nice place to visit, but I'm glad we're moving to Bogota instead of here.

September 11th, 2006

2006-09-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

Men of Harlech stop your dreaming
Can't you see their spear points gleaming
See their warrior's pennants streaming
To this battle field

Men of Harlech stand ye steady
It cannot be ever said ye
For the battle were not ready
Stand and never yield

Form the hills rebounding
Let this war cry sounding
Summon all at Cambria's call
The mighty force surrounding

Men of Harlech onto glory
This shall ever be your story
Keep these fighting words before ye
Cambria (Welshmen never) will not yield

Playing at the world's smallest casino

2006-09-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

It turns out that my hotel has a casino, it has around 50
slot machines and 8 craps tables. The minimum bet is one
dollar (ecuador uses dollars, not sucres based on dollars, but
our physical dollars. What the hell?), so this isn't James Bond
casino elegance.

I did have a nice time though. Free drinks, free appetizers and I
played blackjack for money for the first time. I didn't know there
were so many rules, I normally stick to video poker or craps but
due to a lack of craps tables it was either blackjack or a one armed
bandit. I had some drinks, went up and down in chips and left with the
same number of chips I walked in with. The cashier took my $50 in
chips and handed me 5 20's.

I started to walk out, thinking had I won $50 and not noticed? I started
to turn around and walk back, angels and demons tugging my legs so
hard that I walked woodenly back into the casino with a strange straight
leg step that made the guard stare at me. With the cross winds of guilt/
honesty/theft/greed blowing backward and around, I made it back to
the cage and asked them to check the video...I think they gave me too
much money.

The cashier looked at me like I spoke greek instead of spanish and called
the security guys to check the tape. Whether or not there is even tape in
the machines, the tape found that I was right. and stupid. I walked woodenly
out, with my angels and demons just hitching a ride to see what other stupidity
I can dig up.

I ate sushi at the hotel bar (I like this hotel, the Dann Carlton), if this place had
a titty bar and a craps table in the casino it would be my version of heaven.
I walked back into the casino intent on winning back my $50 that I had never really
had.

I sat down and learned why blackjack could be really fun, with a streak that I kept
running by letting the winnings ride, until I got to $32 and I was sitting with a 15, the
dealer had a 10 card, I said "give me a 6!" and a six appeared to the astonishment of the
table. so I walked out with $55, about 5 drinks and half a plate of appatizers.
A nice little casino.

traveling shoes

2006-09-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

I put on my ugly but easy to take off shoes that I normally wear
when traveling and jetted off down here to ecuador this evening
My plane arrived at 11:10 pm, just as the buzz from my free in first class
drinks wore off. It's hard to have first impressions in a darkened city,
the surrounding neighborhood is built right up to the airport, but it looks
quiet and everyone seems nice.

I've never been here before, but it seems similar to Bogota, really high
altitude and kind of cool for august (2800 m, 59 deg F). My first trip
to Bogota was a white knuckled adventure, the only thing I knew about
the country was what i had seen in a Harrison ford movie. A driver picked
me up at the airport and dropped me off in a fairly dirty company apartment,
I didn't know if I could drink the water, there was no food and I had no
pesos. I pictured armed bandits outside the windows, armed with RPG's
waiting to attack my convoy. I boiled some water and stuck in the freezer
to cool down and went to sleep on someone's bed.

I woke up that next morning to a beautiful day in one of the nicest neighborhoods
I've ever lived in. The other engineers used our apartment as a party pad, so
it was kind of funky, but nice. This trip I know more what to expect, so the
massive throng of people waiting outside the airport was no big deal. A driver
picked me up and dropped me at my fairly 3 star hotel, and now I'm blogging
on a wireless network, wondering what will happen next.

If I don't totally fuck up the next couple of weeks I'll be changing the blog
name from coonassintexas to coonassincolombia. This is more alliterative, but
I'll probably have to change it to something that offends no one.

Fuck 'em, C in C it is!

To 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

2006-08-31T18:30:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn has a quote that exactly explains how I feel
about 9/11 conspiracy theorists in a review of the Popular
Mechanics 9/11 conspiracy debunking book:

But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Today way back in 2005 - Aug 28

2006-08-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here was one key mistake last year, nagin ordered the evac
sunday morning, instead of saturday afternoon like Jefferson
Parish:

Mayor Nagin just ordered a mandatory evacuation, by
reading the legaleze version of the order instead of saying
more plainly it is time to leave, and if you don't leave no
one will come rescue you.

Hopefully it wasn't poorly executed and too late.

Governor blanco just mentioned that President Bush called to
make sure there was a mandatory evactuation.

She keeps mentioning being blessed, and she keeps repeating
herself and mentioning flying in and looking at the traffic.
Instead of a governor she is really just a traffic reporter
and a bad one at that.

I voted for Bobby Jindal, and I wish that fast talking guy had
won. posted by Joe at 7:16 AM | 0 comments

I wish I hadn't been right last year. It was apparent to me watching
from 2000 miles away what to do and when to do it. People that
have never lived in new orleans don't realize that katrina was the storm
we talked about since betsy in 1965, the storm that would fill the bowl.
None of the things that happened were unexpected, I had heard stories
from boyhood about carrying an axe into the attic in case you have to cut
your way out.

Today way back in 2005

2006-08-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

Last year on this day I was working on a drilling project in Barbados
and spending my non-working time glued to CNN. It had been apparent
to me from the day before that there was a big risk of 'the big one'
hitting new orleans and I was glad to see that the local and state officials
were starting the evacuation, even if it was a day late.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Katrina is coming

I'm watching CNN here in Barbados, and I'm amazed that
Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard is giving detailed
driving instructions to an international audience. He was
mayor of Kenner when I was growing up, now he's a bejowled
power broker telling an international audience not to take
the Huey P. Long bridge; but he didn't say which way to go.

Whew, I'm glad I'm not a resident of the west bank of Jefferson
Parish...they've got to take a drive on Highway 90 to lafayette,
which is a 2 1/2 hour drive over swampy causeways with no
traffic, add 200,000 people and it will be a 6 hour bataan death-
drive just to Lafayette. (or risk a one-lane merge from I-310 to
I-10...bleh) Once you're in lafayette I'd definitely keep going
to Houston.

[....digression to another hurricane story...]
posted by Joe at 10:27 AM

So two days before the storm I wasn't exactly in a panic, I was
inviting our parents and sisters who live in southern mississippi
to come west, and I suggested to my wife that she invite friends
in Lafayette too.

Then I went back to work for 12 hours or so and then back to
the hotel where instead of sleeping I surfed the net, because CNN
had little about the storm.

CNN Sucks

I'm watching CNN again and in the last 12 hours they've shown
the anti-bush screed about bad intelligence 3 times! The approaching
disaster in New Orleans could be just about as bad as the Tsunami was,
but they've had 36 hours of warning about the story.

Hopefully Governor Blanco's prayers are just as effective as Governor
Foster's were for Hurricane Lily, because it looks like it's gonna be bad.
It would be nice to see some urgency from the 24 hour news channel.
posted by Joe at 3:54 AM

One of the most interesting things about blogging is it puts a time stamp
on memories, I just remember a frustrating night with little information
from the TV , but these notes at least put the memories into a framework.

whew! I got my blog back on.

2006-08-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I managed to rembember my blogger username and password
finally. I couldn't post for week, I was so used to firefox knowing my
username/password or when I used another computer I used the
dummy "forgot my password" link and blogger emailed the link.

Something has changed though. Blogger is becoming more googlefied
and apparently I signed into my google account and screwed up the
works, because they kept emailing me access to my google account,
with no blog anywhere to be seen.

I thought: "Shit, I've lost my blog". And I walked around with about
100 ideas for great posts swimming in my head, when normally I have
to scrape for 3 or 4 posts per week. Since I made a conscious decision
not to post about family or directly about work, anything I'm going to
write tends to be about travel or politics and that's not too much to go
on when I have to grit my teeth to watch the news.

But I found the answer on a blogger user group, someone suggested logging
in to post a comment fixing a similar problem to mine. Apparently I've
logged into blogger to post comments a lot more, because just the action
of writing a comment made my username/password pop out of my
subconcious.

Great, I'm back, what were all those Ideas again? doh!

of course we'll win.

2006-08-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

I posted this as a comment at hugh hewitt's site, I've had a few bloody
mary's so maybe my comment doesn't match what his post is about.
hmm. damn tomato juice:

I think that it's obvious that we'll win, we're now at the low point of the story, things look dark in Iraq, Israeli's are reeling back from lebannon with a peace of paper and a large percent of the people in the us think that the government had a part in 9/11. But all of that and we're way ahead of where europe was in 1939.

This lowpoint is just an artificial low setting the stage for the sweep of history, the brave will still step up and fight, the stout-hearted will loyally support what is right and just, and what will seem like miracles of courage will lead us forward to victory. Even in the darkest days of 1940, Winston Churchill never doubted ultimate victory, and I don't either. Even in my black dog days of depression I know that we'll win, because we have more at stake.
Freedom, love, justice will vanish from the planet if we don't win, so win we must.

The debate will continue, which is a good thing,
but whether they are with us or against us, history will justify the fight and we'll win.

It's the Cans!

2006-08-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

Scrappleface has a funny
story explaining terrorism
and tries to answer the
question, why do terrorists
hate airplanes?

Excerpt:

"
The expert panel will examine various theories about why airplanes engender such hatred among devoted followers of a peaceful religion.

“Is it the horrendous noise? The speed? The condensation trails?” said one unnamed source close to the panel, listing some of the areas of inquiry the experts plan to pursue. “Because if it’s any of those things, we can get to work on engineering changes to make airplanes more tolerable to our Muslim brothers.”

Al-reuters fallout

2006-08-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

The LA weekly on LGF's discovery of al-reuters
publishing retouched photos:

In exposing Hajj’s manipulations, Johnson has raised the lid on a potential Pandora’s box. Namely, how our leading news agencies and newspapers increasingly rely on stringers from hostile nations to tell us how we, or our allies, behave in wartime. Since you’d be hard-pressed to find Muslims in the U.S., let alone Europe, who aren’t strongly anti-Israel and opposed to any American presence in the Middle East whatsoever, why on earth would you expect to find neutral Arab reporters in Baghdad or Beirut? This is the kind of question newspaper editors should be asking themselves (and their stringers). If the implications of this are followed through, or if more photographers like Adnan “Photoshop” Hajj are discovered, the ramifications are likely to be significant. In helping bring Hajj’s smoke-and-mirrors game to light, Johnson has performed a great service.

Import tax for Oil

2006-08-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

Almost every news item that isn't discussing the war seems to be
discussing the price of oil and how we're all going to be sweating in the
dark soon. The real solution will require major changes in how energy
is generated and used and how we live. But don't go installing the $30k
solar electric system this week. Before we can develop real solutions
we need to ensure the high price of energy for the forseable future.

Most people are hoping for the price of oil to fall back to $12/barrel
again where it was just a few years ago, but that is part of the problem.
One of the reasons that the world isn't producing enough oil is most projects
take several years to develop from prospect to drilling to producing oil,
and every 3 years or so the price of oil goes from $50/bbl to $12/bbl. This
tends to make oil companies risk averse, if you drill a prospect that has
lifting costs of $22/bbl, and then the price of oil goes to $12, you are as they
say in spanish, jodido.

Even after 2 years of pretty good oil pricing, we're not near the drilling activity
that is possible (which would require building more rigs). Anyone that has
been in the industry more than 5 years knows that as soon as you make a big
down payment on a new corvette, the industry will go to shit, and you face being out
of a job. Even with $75 oil, I feel that it will just take a year with no hurricanes
shutting down production and a slightly calmer middle east to bring prices back
to $35/bbl, and we can all go back to suv'ing.

What we need is long term fairly high prices to wean us off of oil.
My simple proposal is that while the price of oil is high we institute an import
tax on oil to keep the price of oil in the US at $50/bbl. Then domestic oil
companies can use a price of $50/bbl as their planning price for oil and
domestic production can increase. This will have a side effect of making
the economic price of alternative energies higher, since I've already learned
from bitter personal experience that solar enery
depends on the price of oil just as much as SUV sales (inversely).

With high oil prices in ten years every family will probably have one electric
car, construction of nuclear plants will have resumed and people will begin to install
solar electric panels on every house. When oil is consistently $50/bbl over 10
years we'll start to see hybrid SUV's that includes a big-ass battery pack
and a KW of PV panels on the roof or a connection to the home PV system.

I can dream, but I know that what will probably happen is the economy will slow down,
we'll stop buying so much chinese crap and the need for oil will decrease...letting
the price of oil go back to $12, ending the US oil industry for another 5 years.

Today in history - Hiroshima - Aug, 6 1945

2006-08-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

Today in 1945 was
the day that the
Enola Gay dropped
the first fission bomb
used in war.

People look back at
this and say "what
monsters we americans
were"

Euroweenies might
say that we should have
invaded japan rather
than nuking them.

[photo link]

But President Truman was told that we could suffer
1 million casualties in an invasion of Japan. This was
believable after the invasion of Okinawa, where more
people died than due to the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

Truman's priorities looked something like this:
US Civilians
US Soldiers
Japanese Civilians
Japanese Soldiers

He weighed the lives of his troops heavier than Japanese
civilians, and chose to end the war by nuking the japanese
rather than trying the invasion.

This ranking is no longer true, enemy civilians deaths are a bigger
tragedy than the deaths of our soldiers. Through rules of engagement
we expect marines to clear rooms by sticking their head in and
looking rather than the older technique of throwing grenades
in and following up with bullets, then looking.

It's obvious that the Israeli's are facing an even harder problem,
the world press ranks their civilians as less valuable than lebannese
civilians. Israeli's are killed by rockets that are aimed at them...no
big deal, lebannese civilians are killed by accident...oh, woe.

I think this war is going to get worse before getting better. If
hezbollah survives this war, we'll soon be facing hezbollah terrorist
attacks that will be emanating from a country that is in theory
a democracy and america's friend. Iran may begin shooting missiles
at Israel, either by proxy or directly.

When it does get worse, we need to look at how we are ranking
people and objectives. Can we win this war if we weigh enemy civilians
as more valuable than our soldiers? We don't need a 'shock and awe'
campaign of bombs against empty palaces, we need to make a concious
decision after discussion how the war is to be fought.

Can we win if we have to apologize for every bomb dropped, especially
when fighting an enemy that sees apologies as weakness?

Conspiracy Theories

2006-08-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

The recent bombing at Qana followed by the splashing of
the dead children's photos across the front page of newspapers
further highlights bias in the press. This event was well
documented at EU referendom, and I think it is obvious
that the photos were staged by hezbollah and photographed
by the press. If one photo shows one guy holding a dead
child, then a second photo shows another guy holding the
same dead child in the same place in the same pose, then
I'd say it's reasonable to say the photos were staged or
posed.

This issue was discussed on the daily telegraph's blog:

But he's not asking any of those things. His contention is that this is a staged photo. Like Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's JFK, North gives us, in laborious detail, the fruits of his 'research'. I'll let you read the argument in its full glory.
Now I have to admit that I have a problem with conspiracy theorists whatever their stripe. Their method is to promote the facts that fit their beliefs, rather than the other way around. Their motive is to create enough doubt obscure the real issue.
These armchair photo experts speculate on whether this rescue worker has enough dust on him, or whether that pile of bricks has landed at an angle consistent with the bombing. Arguing with these people is pointless; if you disagree with them it's because you're biased.

The writer's argument is bad, he set's up a series of straw men
then half-way knocks them down, not even worth fisking. What's more
interesting is he's quick to label this as a quacky conspiracy theory, when I
seriously doubt he takes the same tack with other nutty conspiracy
that don't match his worldview.

So as an expirement, let me google the writer, Shane Richmond, along with
"conspiracy theories", and what do I find? he's got a pretty good column attacking conspiracy theories that maybe shows his real bias.

No matter what happens, it’s always possible for a conspiracy theorist to find ‘evidence’ of a hidden agenda. Indeed, they often don’t need evidence, the very lack of it constitutes proof for these people.

If they can pose a question that can’t be answered, this somehow counts as proof of their version of events. Offer an answer and you’re back in “how convenient” territory again.

Drunkblogging - Nuke 'em from orbit

2006-08-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

I see that Allah is drunkblogging to see if he can repeat
mel gibson's expirement and start spouting anti-semitic
BS just due to alchohol. I'm also drunkblogging, drinking
double gin beefeater bloody-marys, switching the tv between
CNN, Fox and Entourage on HBO.

I'm at the "let's go back to the ship and nuke 'em from orbit"
point, as these fuckers in Iraq all chant together. After about
10 oz of beefeaters in 2 hours, not only is the tower guard
on the label looking at me funny, but he's got the voice of
anderson cooper on CNN, and it sounds pretty bad.

I'm sure reality isn't this bleak, but if we were to deorbit
10 or 20 nukes that are probably hanging up there (after
withdrawing all of our troops to kurdistan and kuwait) and
just roll those bad boys out, roll the bones, zap the neutrons,
flash, bang, thank you maam. Wipe the slate clean, Sand
to glass. Hot times in the city. Would that be such a bad
thing?

In a little while my wife will get home from the "no texas
sales tax sale" and I'll see that things aren't that bad and that
it's a good thing that there's no guy with a football dozing on my
sofa. Good job mr. Prez. and to those people serving in Iraq.
Those Iraqis don't deserve your sacrifices.

Meanwhile, back in the present war

2006-08-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm a little too busy right now to google a good event from

history today, so here's likeks:

From Lilek's Screedblog today: (8/3)

Of course, he’s right. Without the steady, respected hand of Iran on the Middle Eastern helm, the Syrian regime might be replaced by pragmatic elements of the military unwilling to enjoy the boon of Persian dominance. One can excuse the occasional, inexplicable acts of Iranian mischief; the mullahs no doubt are busy destabilizing Iraq today, for example, but only to achieve a more stable future (Would that our leaders had such foresight!) Granted, their rhetoric is hardly helpful – a New York Times photo of a billboard in Tehran shows the well-fed adamant face of Sheik Nasrallah, a man about whose movement the gentle Democrat from Michigan has no opinion, and the billboard’s English text reads “Israel must be wiped out the world.” (sic)

Extreme? Sure. That’s how those loveable nuts talk over there. You’d have to be nuts – or a Jew! - to take it seriously. But what if the billboard suggests to a third option?

ha ha ha, those loveable jews. Fooled you, I did google some today, I went
to time's archive and searched for the word Jew's from 1934 to 1939. After
three tries I found this loveable sentiment.
[pretty cool archive, but i'm not paying them today]

Jun. 5, 1939
"They [the Jews] ... are using their not inconsiderable influence in the Press and in Parliament to embroil us with Germany." Thus wrote the Very Rev. William Ralph ("The Gloomy Dean") Inge, retired dean of London's St. Paul's Cathedral, in the Church of England Newspaper. When the fuming British press demanded proofs, the lemoncholy divine admitted: "I have no direct knowledge."Testifying against the Wagner Health Bill on the grounds that it might loose a flood of needless Government-given medical care, Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the...

When people say "never again", what does that mean. Specifically
that we're not going to allow germans to load jews into ovens after
starving them to death, or is it really more general, we're not going
to allow another country to use antisemitism to instigate genocide
using whatever means. I hope it's the second one and we won't let it
happen, again.

From an earlier war 2 Aug 1945

2006-08-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

1945 - During the night (August 1-2), 820 US B-29 Superfortress bombers drop a record total of 6632 tons of bombs on five Japanese cities including Hachioji, Nagaoka, Mito, Toyama and the petroleum center of Kawasaki.

here's a link in german, the photo on the left is the city of toyama:


Am 2.8.1945 bombardieren 850 B-29-Bomber die Stadt Toyama mit 6.600.000 kg Brandbomben. 98,6% der Stadt werden vernichtet; es gibt so gut wie keine Überlebenden.	Tokio am Morgen nach dem Luftangriff in der Nacht des 10. März 1945. Dem dreistündigem Brandbombardement fielen schätzungsweise 130.000 Menschen zum Opfer.

the translated caption: o 2.8.1945 bombards 850 B-29-Bomber the city Toyama with 6.600.000 kg of incendiary bombs. 98.6% of the city are destroyed; it gives as well as no survivors.

This is what total war looks like.

Tidal Wave - Raid on Ploesti - August 1st 1943

2006-08-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

Today in 1943
was one of the
bigger attacks
on the Romanian
refineries that
helped feed Hitler's
war machine.

(in elementary school
I must have checked
out a book, Air War
over Europe, I think,
at least 10 times, it had
this picture as its cover)

From the great website http://www.ww2guide.com/oil.shtml

Across the Mediterranean
Despite careful preparation the operation was marred by bad luck from the start, one B-24 crashed on take-off. Since the mission was flown in radio silence the bomber groups became somewhat separated on the long flight across the Mediterranean. Then just off Corfu, Greece the lead aircraft carrying the route navigator inexplicably plunged into the water. A second plane of the 376th with the deputy route navigator followed down to see if there were any survivors. Unable to regain formation the bomber turned back to base. This left the lead bomber group without the expert navigators to guide them through the difficult low-level approach to the target.
Thick clouds greeted the incoming bombers as they approached the mountains. While the two lead groups threaded their way through or under the cloud layers the 98th, 44th and 389th crossed at various altitudes. By the time these three bomber groups were formed up and heading for the first IP (Initial Point) they were 29 minutes behind the 376th and the 93rd.
Confusion and Bravery at Ploesti
Meanwhile not knowing if the other bomber groups were forced to turn back or not the 376th and 93rd made their turn at the first IP of Pitesti toward the final IP of Floresti. However, halfway to the real IP the 376th mistook the town of Targoviste for Floresti, an error that wasn't discovered until they were on the outskirts of Bucharest. At that point Major Gen. Uzal Ent broke radio silence and ordered the two groups to turn north and attack targets of opportunity in the complex of refineries. The carefully worked out bombing plan was foiled as bombers struck the wrong refinery or attacked any target that looked good.
Getting Home
German fighters pursued the bombers as they left bringing down more than a few damaged aircraft. Of the 177 bombers that took part in the mission 54 were lost, a further 53 planes were heavily damaged. It was a costly victory by any measure. The damage to Ploesti was significant but offset by its spair refining capacity and the fact that a raid like this could not be mounted again for quite some time. The Medal of Honor presented to Col. John Riley "Killer" Kane (1907-1996) is one of five presented for the mission, the most ever awarded for a single action. Three of the awards were posthumous: 2nd Lt. Lloyd H. Hughes (-), a native of Alexandria, Louisiana; Lt. Col. Addison Baker (-); and Maj. John L. Jerstad (-). The other Medal of Honor presented to a living recipient for that day's battle was to Col. Leon W. Johnson (1904-1997).

Maybe like the air war over germany we need to identify some key
elements of the enemy and attack it. Currently we are still fruitlessly
bombarding the ball bearing plants of the islamofacsists, we need to be smashing
the refineries and syn-fuel plants instead, the twin towers of islamofacism:
wahabbi islam and the mullahs of Iran need to come down.

Contempt for the foe, 31 July 1943

2006-07-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

*PETRARCA, FRANK J.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 145th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division. Place and date: At Horseshoe Hill, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, 27 July 1943. Entered service at: Cleveland, Ohio. Birth: Cleveland, Ohio. G.O. No.: 86, 23 December 1943. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Petrarca advanced with the leading troop element to within 100 yards of the enemy fortifications where mortar and small-arms fire caused a number of casualties. Singling out the most seriously wounded, he worked his way to the aid of Pfc. Scott, Iying within 75 yards of the enemy, whose wounds were so serious that he could not even be moved out of the direct line of fire Pfc Petrarca fearlessly administered first aid to Pfc. Scott and 2 other soldiers and shielded the former until his death. On 29 July 1943, Pfc. Petrarca. during an intense mortar barrage, went to the aid of his sergeant who had been partly buried in a foxhole under the debris of a shell explosion, dug him out, restored him to consciousness and caused his evacuation. On 31 July 1943 and against the warning of a fellow soldier, he went to the aid of a mortar fragment casualty where his path over the crest of a hill exposed him to enemy observation from only 20 yards distance. A target for intense knee mortar and automatic fire, he resolutely worked his way to within 2 yards of his objective where he was mortally wounded by hostile mortar fire. Even on the threshold of death he continued to display valor and contempt for the foe, raising himself to his knees, this intrepid soldier shouted defiance at the enemy, made a last attempt to reach his wounded comrade and fell in glorious death.

........................................................................................
Are we now so PC that we're not even allowed to show contempt for those who
would gladly kill us? Would even the army be allowed to write a medal
citation like this today?

Private Petrarca is honored here for his sacrifice, and also honored with the Medal
of Honor. Follow the link to see the stories of all the heroes.

Lost Blackbird July 30th 1966

2006-07-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

I was looking at google smashups linked from the High-tech
Texan website, and one of the most interesting is the google
map showing locations of all the SR-71 blackbirds with links
to all the current photos, including summaries of all the
SR-71 crashes.

The crash that happened on July 30th 1966:

M-21 tail number 06941 was destroyed 30 Jul 1966 when the D-21 drone it was launching bounced off the inside of the mothership's shockwave and struck 941 near the wing root. Lockheed test pilot Bill Park and Launch Control Officer Ray Torick ejected safely over the Pacific, but Torick drowned when his flight suit took on water.

Sad to see such dry text to describe the death of someone who died
doing their duty for their country.

Short trippin'

2006-07-28T03:58:00.000-07:00

I had to zoom up to canada for the last couple of days, yet another
fools errand and a lot of travel for about 16 hours worth of work.
I should have said "that's really not my job to go to the rig" and stayed
home, but the manager there asked me, and I could hear in his voice
that he was on the verge of mentioning that the last time I went there
he paid for my wife to go too. So I went.

8 hours flying to edmonton, 3 hours lost in a hotshot, the driver couldn't
find the rig, 3 hours working then 4 hours sleep on a bed with no sheets
blankets or pillows (when did I become such a pussy?). 12 hours more
work to finish drilling, wait one hour for a car, 2 hours to edmonton...
no room at the inn by the airport, so we rode into edmonton. 3 hours
sleep, then taxi to the airport in time to be two hours early. Whenever
I'm two hours early I'm sure to check in, breeze through customs, immigration
and security in about 4 minutes. (US immigration is in Canada, strange)
Wait 1 hour 56 minutes drinking coffee and eating the worst muffin in the
western hemispere, then 8 hours back to houston, losing another hour to
time travel.

So in 48 hours I spent 16 hours on planes, 6 in cars, 7 sleeping, 15 working.
I got home and slept on the sofa then moved to the bed and made up most
of the lost sleep. I neglected to brush my teeth though during the migration
so I woke up with a taste like a bear's ass in my mouth.

Bleh. I hate my job.

I did get treated to a canadian coworker espousing his views on the middle east:
It's all due to the US support for Israel and Israel surpressing the palestinians.
I didn't feel up to debating, I just asked him if it is his suggested policy that the
Israelis should cut their own throats or not, then suggested we talk
about sports instead.

I used to like to debate, but views with such strongly held stupidity aren't really
debatable. I'd like to think that we are talking map versus coastline, but it is
probably more like religion and we won't find out reality until we are all dead.

Today's military trivia

2006-07-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

July 24

North Vietnam Increases Air Defense Capabilities

1965 In the air war, four F-4C Phantom jets escorting a formation of U.S. bombers on a raid over munitions manufacturing facilities at Kang Chi, 55 miles northwest of Hanoi, are fired at from an unknown launching site. It was the first time the enemy had launched antiaircraft missiles at U.S. aircraft.

It's interesting to see that the first time we were fired at it
probably wasn't a big deal. But after dozens of planes shot down
over 8 years it became pretty important. What small seed of the
future is happening now i wonder. Missiles shot at Israel or arms
shipments from Iran to Syria? Or precision weapons to Isreal?

Unfortunately we live in interesting times.

Hero du jour- 23 July

2006-07-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

This from today's date during Korean war:

Corporal Tibor Rubin distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism during the period from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, while serving as a rifleman with Company I, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division in the Republic of Korea. While his unit was retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, Corporal Rubin was assigned to stay behind to keep open the vital Taegu-Pusan Road link used by his withdrawing unit. During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin. He inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force during his personal 24-hour battle, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal successfully.

Read the rest, the rest is more interesting.

Today in History - Uday and Qusay fear the reaper

2006-07-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

On this date in 2003 Saddam's Sons got their turn in front of
the mortician's camera. We can weigh the pluses and minus'
of the Iraq war, and this is definitely a plus. I don't have to
live in a world where these dickhead are copresidents.

As I continue to google this event all I seem to find is the
outrage over showing their bullet ridden corpses.

This day in american military history, no 1

2006-07-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite blogs is Free market fairy tales from the UK.
He does a "this day in history" type post almost every day to show the
brilliance of English arms since the middle ages. Usually the post
is something like: "During the Indian Mutiny Sgt Micklewaitstaff continued
leading his 6 soldiers after being wounded 19 times while single-
handidly winning the battle of Dungstinkalotpreshnam, and was
awarded the posthumous victoria cross". I'm usually pretty amazed
by these stories, until I think of the equivalent story in a flashman
book and what really happened.

I thought of trying my hand at this, and post tales of marshal valor
from the west side of the atlantic. Today in history, (July 21st) was
the first battle of bull run, or Mansassas to my fellow southerners.

On July 21, McDowell, turning Beauregard's left, attacked the Confederates near the stone bridge over Bull Run and drove them back to the Henry House Hill. There Confederate resistance, with Gen. Thomas J. Jackson standing like a “stone wall,” checked the Union advance, and the arrival of Gen. E. Kirby Smith's brigade turned the tide against the Union forces. The unseasoned Union volunteers retreated, fleeing along roads jammed by panicked civilians who had turned out in their Sunday finery to watch the battle. The retreat became a rout as the soldiers made for the defenses of Washington, but the equally inexperienced Confederates were in no condition to make an effective pursuit. The South rejoiced at the result, while the North was spurred to greater efforts to win the war.

That's not exactly a glorious day in US military history, but since they
were "our boys" I'll claim it as a victory. General Beauregard was from
louisiana, (I know he lived in New Orleans after the war, he ran the lottery),
and I lived in the E. Kirby Smith dorm for a year at LSU, I just never knew
who he was until just now.

This battle taught the northern soldiers how to run, and made the reputation
of Stonewall Jackson and the Stonewall Brigade.

The Tom Clancy effect

2006-07-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

HBO is showing "The Hunt for Red October" this afternoon, which
was a fantastic book and not a bad movie at the time. It just came out
about 2 years too late when the Soviet Union was already in mid-collapse.

This movie brought to mind something I thought of earlier in the week.
As soon as the planes hit the wtc and the pentagon on september 11th,
I immediately thought of the Tom Clancy novel "Debt of Honor", in which
a war with japan ended with a 747 crashing into the Capitol building on
purpose. I thought it was interesting that Al Queda likes Tom Clancy
novels.

Now that the war in the middle east is heating up, it reminds me of
the book "Executive Orders", where a war happened after a cabal
including china and iran hatched a plan to take over Saudi Arabia.

Really nothing like what's happening now, except that one side effect
of Korea firing it's missiles last week was an aircraft carrier group moving
from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, so that we would have 5 in the
Pacific. Call me paranoid, or Clanseyesque, but Korea might have been
a distraction from a bigger plan. How long until we can call the Axis of
evil just the "Axis Powers"?

Broken hockey stick

2006-07-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

A link on Jerry Pournelle's mail page leads to a report delivered
to the House committee on Energy and commerce on the study
by Mann et al that purported to show that the 1990's were the
hottest decade in the last 1000 years, and created that 'hockey
stick' graph that is generally used as a prop when they are shouting
"haliburton, oil, global warming, bushhitler"

This report by emminent statisticians (who will now be accused of
being in the pay of oil companies) seems to say that the original paper
is a load of bunk, and was only peer-reviewed in the sense that
a small group of scientists with similar beliefs used the same datasets
over and over to confirm what each of them were saying.

Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history. Wegman’s analysis concludes that Mann’s work cannot support claim that the1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium.

Report: “Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.”

I don't think this totally disproves global warming or climate change, because
from personal experience I remember it being colder when I was younger.
New Years eve in New Orleans in the 70's was cold and frozen to watch the
neighbors shoot off their spare money on fireworks. Now it hasn't frozen in
New Orleans since the early 90's. So to me it seems warmer.

Also, Mann's pick of 1998 as the hottest year ever agreed with my experience
because I was working in a job that required me to be outside every day
starting in May 1998 and going through 1999. I'd come back into the office,
covered in sweat and salt streaked, send out a few emails then trudge off to
a bar, and I learned that if you want to get really twisted, work yourself to
heat exhaustion then drink a 6 pack of 16 oz beers. bam. cheap drunk,
but it was really hot.

I work in the oil industry, so you might think that I'm obviously in the pay
of the great oil/hal/militaryindustrialbushchimphitler circlejerk. But in reality
I'd like to know the truth. We should be spending our money on studying
what is really happening now, and what might happen. Is my anecdotal
heating just due to heat island effect in the cities that I've lived in? maybe,
but I don't know and I don't think the experts do either.

If it really is getting hotter, but just one or two degrees, then I agree with
bjorn lomberg, there are bigger problems out there that we should spend money
on instead of countries wasting money on Kyoto.

Lomberg speaks

2006-07-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

It's always been funny to me how Bjorn Lomberg sounds like one
of the most reasonable and intelligent people, yet he's often excoriated
by enviroweenies as in the pay of big oil. His book the skeptical
environmentalist approaches the global warming problem as an
economic problem, how much does the kyoto approach spend for
achieving what amount of mitigation? It finds kyoto lacking and
suggests our money would be better spent fixing worse problems.

There's a great article in the WSJ opinion journal that includes an
interview with Mr Lomberg and discusses his latest project that
attempts to bring together world leaders to prioritize problems.
Turns out, without the hypsters, global warming tends to be at the
bottom of the list.

Prioritization, cost-effectiveness, efficiency--these are the ultimate in rational thinking. (It strikes me they are the ultimate in "free markets," though Mr. Lomborg studiously avoids that term.) They are also nearly unheard-of concepts among the governments, international bodies and aid groups that oversee good works.
Mr. Lomborg's approach has been to organize events around the globe in which leaders are forced to think in new ways. His task is certainly timely, with groups like the U.N. engaged in debate over "reform," and philanthropists such as Warren Buffett throwing billions at charitable foundations. But, I ask, can the world really become more rational? "It's no use just talking about all the great things you'd like to accomplish--we've got to get there," says Mr. Lomborg.

This kind of approach is what we need to begin to move away from the fuzzy thinking that currently fills the world. not in magic magic land but in the real world how do we solve problems. In the real world we're not feeding at infinitely large government troughs, we need to show value for money. Government should be held to the same standard which I believe will lead to a better overall result.

Hookers at the point

2006-07-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

One of the side effects of the Calgary stampede is
the city is full of drunken horny cowboys. My moderately
priced downtown hotel's parking lot is apparently street-
hooker central. I'm high enough up that I can't see if they
are pretty or ugly, but it looks like there is a rotating
crew of 4 to 6 blondes.

I have no problem with hookering (hookerfication, hookerstitution?)
on any moral grounds, but do their johns have to make so much
noise? Horns and the roar of engines, followed by burning rubber
declares to the world that some young guy got his first bj. I have
to fight the urge to switch to granpa simpson voice "keep it down,
you whippersnappers!"

Being high above them in the hotel, I can watch the activities like
it's a giant sim game, "SimCity, the dark side". Miniature car rolls
up, honks their horn (/shake fist "quiet!" /shake fist off)
negotiations happen, roll around the block, dirty deed, and back
again and goodbye with a hug. Repeat. (the repeat part makes it
fairly disgusting) It's better than the TV here, no hbo at all, so I'm
stuck watching the canadian discovery (all global warming, all the time)
channel, or the pimps and hos down below.

Protein wisdom

2006-07-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

Jeff over at protein wisdom is dueling with a troll who has
insulted and threatened his child who claims to be a professor
at a western university. I'd say Jeff needs our support, but
he doesn't need much help. With his razor sharp wit he's already
cutting down this troll like she brought a knife to a gun fight.

Best jibe so far: "When I’m done with you, Deb, you’re going to
be an internet verb.".

His site is down now due to a ddos attack, which is ironic; trolls
are using zombie computers to attack.

Updated

well, the verb is Frisch, apparently it really was Deborah Frisch at
the university of Arizona. To be Frisched will be to be hounded
from polite society, at least on the web.

I have no problem with profanity and insults in comments, but
her comments against Jeff Goldstein's son were disgusting and
specific. I think blogging should be like the mafia, leave the family
out of it. Since Frisch broke that code, she should be shunned by
all.

delinking

2006-07-07T23:46:00.000-07:00

I tend to click on acidman's site just as a habit.
Two or three times a day is what I used to read there
music, girls with red toe nail polish, the crazy psycho
cunt were all topics for my daily read.

Godspeed acidman!

It's going to be a very meloncholy blogosphere, if all the dozens
of links that we read on a daily basis ever start to die off. i'm
bummed and it was just acidmand's turn. I've got a few dozen
links, and another 100 or so IE bookmarks for blogs that I
read at least weekly...what'll we do when everyone is connected
and people die or have problems. I think in a normal agricultural
life people only knew 20 or 30 people. I wonder if we're meeting
more now, or less.

How will this look in 2o years? different I suppose.

Fire?

2006-07-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

The last post was rudely interupted by a fire alarm...I had to
dash down 20 stories thinking, shit, I've got my hotel sorted
for next week and it'll probably burn down, and my laptop too.

False alarm though, but it made me think of all the fire alarms
offshore, where if it's at sunday and 1pm it's obviously a drill,
but if it's 2 am you are highly motivated to go instantly from a
deep sleep to putting on a life vest and carrying your ass to an
escape capsule or the muster area tout suite. All the time not
knowing if the well is blowing out and on fire, or the toolpusher
is having fun jerking our chains.

This can lead to some interesting reflexes, so that a 2 am fire
alarm in a hotel can make me groggily shoot half naked out of
a room, standing around looking for a lifeboat. I did that once
at the holiday inn in New orleans, some poor japanese lady
saw me standing in my underwear and gave me a "gah! my eyes!"
kind of expression, or maybe she said the japanese equivalent for
"gah!". who knows.

Calgary Stampede!

2006-07-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

It's stampede week here in calgary, which means two things, that my hotel
has been trying to kick me out and it's parade day. My reservation was
only through wednesday since I was only supposed to be here a couple of
days. A new trick I learned for extending a hotel stay when the entire city
is full, keep asking at the desk and ask a different person every time.
Someone finally said yes and let me stay. Yee hah, the joys of overbooking.

Oh yeah, and I just watched most of the parade through downtown calgary.
It's hard for me to go to a parade, I'm from new orleans and I've probably
seen around 200 parades, but here everyone is shouting ya-hoo, and I have
to resist the urge to shout "show your tits!". Apparently calgary is very
family oriented and would not appreciate the humor. (the horrors of
a canadian jail are to be avoided at all costs)

Anyway, my favorite parts of the parade this morning were the flyovers
by the canadian aerobatic team (the snowbirds?), pretty cool, but get some
real planes, eh. And the punjabi pride float, with the driver's head sticking out
front of the float, with turban leading the way.

Fire alarm! keep blogging or run away?

*Click

2006-07-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

We went to the movies the other night to see the movie
'the breakup', but since the ever wonderful katy mills theater
had a technical hiccup and canceled the movie, we switched
over to see the movie *click with Adam Sandler.

I thought it would be a typical funny but stupid Sandler movie,
and from my wife's expression she thought it would be a stupid
but not funny movie. It turned out to be the best movie I've
seen in a while, and had me surreptitiously wiping away tears,
since I saw so much of my life in the movie. Life, Death and
wasting time as we fast forward through life on autopilot.

How many days have I spent offshore just trying to get time to
pass so i could get back home and drink, then go back offshore
to earn the money to pay for drinking. (1991 - 1999 pretty much
passed in an alchohol/offshore haze.) I often feel like a hippie
stereotype...what happened in 1995?...heh, hum, he her hum.
Since the millenium and I got married things are much better,
but still time is constantly wasted as I travel and work. Or just
zone out watching tv or playing a video game.

I'd say go see that movie, it's got the typical Adam Sandler funny
stuff, plus it's a really good movie. Another good thing to do is not
work in a job that involves going offshore, or working exhorbitant
amounts of time , even if you make a lot of money. Some people can
save money and that's great, but the great majority spend what they
make and end up in a 15 year ride in the offshore time machine...
unfortunately it doesn't work in reverse.

Well, things are looking up now, I'm back in Calgary and my wife
is flying up this morning so we can enjoy lovely alberta for a couple
of days. Carpe diem is my motto now, which is latin for seize the
airline ticket even if it's expensive, time is short.

Acidman is gone

2006-06-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Boycott the NY times!

2006-06-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

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 conversion from the local imam
on a hot houston friday afternoon. So fuck 'em. They are out of my
bookmarks.

They are cowards, they won't print the mohammed cartoons because
they know the other side's response...a car bomb in their lobby.
They'll print leaked information then hide under the protection of
our freedoms. If they had printed the mohammed cartoons, then I
could believe them..."fair/balanced, yada yada, fuck you, yada, it's
our right". But instead they pick and choose their battles not based
on the principle of freedom of speech, but on their opponents. They
fire and then duck behind cover, always moving toward some political
goal while attacking the bastion of america.

Maybe they'll win, maybe they'll lose but they won't win with my
eyeballs looking at their webpage. No links, no links to posts with
links to the times. Oh yeah, "attica!, attica! attica!"
(not sure what the chant is for, but it seemed more appropriate then
'we shall overcome')

Blogging under the moose

2006-06-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

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 though.

The Coalition of the Coulters

2006-06-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

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 with Ann Coulter, and get labeled as
part of a cult. It's ok. I got a link and now I'm part of something.
I'll wear my Bushie label and Coalition of Coulter badges with pride.

Marine Video

2006-06-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

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 - couldn’t meet, while the Islamofascists are given a standard that your average Visigoth would have considered beneath him. And our own media consider it their mission to make sure that this is known and accepted.

Marines: Never say or breathe a bad thing. If they do they most be executed.

Islamofascists: Murder women and children indiscriminately. If they do, we must reach out and understand them.

Bite me, pen-stroker, just bite me.

Again, I couldn't find the video on you-tube, but if it's anywhere
close to the theme from America, World Police then it's probably pretty
offensive. I'm sure I'll love it since I walked around humming "America, Fuck
yeah!" for weeks after seeing AWP.

Here are the lyrics, posted on Michelle Malkin's website
Read her whole story, she does a nice compare and contrast showing
how the writer of Hadji girl is being railroaded because CAIR is
driving the train.
....
Some better videos that I found searching around youtubewere these
by Drewlee:

Marine Music Video

Our Forces

Pretty powerful stuff.

Instructions from the dark lord

2006-06-13T06:30:00.000-07:00

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
get to do true evil though, just links mostly.

Ann Coulter - tall cool chic

2006-06-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

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. She was listening to the radio she always carried with her, before i-Pods were invented. 'At first I thought it was some shock jock joke,' she says now, 'but then everyone was pulling the same joke'. When the second plane hit, she leaned forward and told the cab driver the news. He didn't react. He was a Muslim. Coulter was instantly alarmed.
After spending all day in a bar in Queens (the bridges were shut, the subway had stopped, she couldn't get back into Manhattan) she wrote her infamous 9/11 column on her laptop, and hasn't changed her view since. Was that her position before, I wonder?
'No, I never cared about the Muslims,' she says of the people she more frequently refers to as 'ragheads'. 'It seemed like a morass - that's why so many popular jokes are based on peace in the Middle East. I thought, it's a morass, other people are dealing with it, I'll write about Clinton.'...

I tend to agree with most of what she says in her books and columns, we
as a country are too politically correct, and too willing to put up with nutso
conspiracy theories. Being a widow of a victim of 911 doesn't entitle you
to tar the president with conspiracy theories that bush knew, etc and not
have anyone such as Coulter fire back. Ann Coulter was more impolite than
I would be in public, but that is tactics not strategy. I mostly agree with
the strategy of calling a traitor a traitor or in my case a coonass a coonass.

Too much talking around problems so that we never offend any group
leads us to our current situation where it is illegal to profile based on race
sex or handicap before people get on airplanes. The reality of what
we are trying to stop is planes being turned into cruise missiles, so I'd feel
better searching all the big and tall men who might be dangerous with a
box cutter. If Granny wants to try and hijack a plane with a box cutter,
bring it on, I can take her.

Another shocking episode from Ann Coulter's career came from a column
written on september 11th:

The night the Twin Towers fell she wrote a now famous column suggesting that 'We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity'.

Once again, tactics not strategy, I wouldn't have converted anyone
to christianity...In fact at the time, I agreed most with Jerry Pournelle
when he wrote what we should do on september 11:

For a start: we know the places where they rejoiced and danced in the streets in celebration of the falling of the towers. Those streets and all their buildings should become monuments: not one stone stands upon another. Level the rubble so that a troop of cavalry could ride across where they stood and not one horse stumble. Then sow salt on those grounds. They will be left as monuments, visible from the air, visible from space: monuments to dead Americans.

"But we did not do it! We only -- we only rejoiced that you would see what it is like."

"You chose the wrong friends. Next time make better friends. You may take what you can carry. You have five minutes, then the bulldozers will flatten this area. Get out of here. And of course if anyone is stupid enough to fire on us, the Marines are eager. Aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Sir. Yes, sir."

Belmont Club, blogging at it's finest

2006-06-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

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 will die for our scruples? How many lives is a punctilious observance of the Geneva Convention worth? One, one hundred, one thousand, one million? And if a million is the price, what are our principles except for sale. The only question being the price.

...

In the last analysis, the preservation of a civilization's values is never free. It is possible to play by whatever rules we feel that our deepest civilizational values compel us to observe. But we must pay the price. We can, like the early Christians choose to face the lions rather than renounce our beliefs. But no one should have any illusions about the lions; and those Christians were virtuous precisely because they had no illusions about the lions. Our willingness to fight by the strictest legal standards must be matched by a corresponding willingness to sacrifice in order to uphold those standards. It may be necessary to bleed and to bleed at home to uphold our beliefs. Or change them. Talk Left merely poses the dilemma. But the choice is ours. The tragedy of the West is that it is simultaneously impatient for safety; intolerant of hardship and unable to bear guilt. The demand for no body bags; no protracted war; no inconvenience; no painstaking effort also means, in it's own way, a secret demand for no law.

I had to google for the reference in the title, it's an incident where
an American named Pedicaris was kiddnapped in North Africa by
El Raisuli, and Teddy Roosevelt sent a telegram to the Sheik in Morocco
demanding that the Sheik obtain the hostage's release, or kill the
kidnapper. TR emphasized the point by sending a big chunk of the
navy, but he certainly didn't say "don't hurt anyone or torture anyone
to obey my instructions, just git her done".

Hi ho the witch is dead (or is it Ding Dong?)

2006-06-08T05:38:00.000-07:00

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 expected to be given at an American military briefing at 4 p.m. local time, 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Much better than capturing him, we don't have to watch his trial
for the next 4 years.

Updated:

Texas Rainmaker shows this much better:

Or commenter Sean on Cold Fury

I pose the same question I asked Al this morning.

Should we all go outside a ululate and pump our fists in the air now?

Anyone got a video cam handy? We can send the tape to al-Jazeera

UUUUlllluullluuuuullluuuuuuuulllluuuuuuuulluuuuuuu
(I'm in canada, I doubt it's acceptable for me to ullulate at the
holiday inn)

'The Story' from Canada

2006-06-07T19:49:00.000-07:00

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!

Canada almost gets attacked, the press here fiddles

2006-06-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

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 rolled in with a second
car and cut the head off the prime minister as they apparently planned.
I think our northern neighbors are still living in the land of september 10th.
I hope nothing else happens here.

Slander echos on

2006-06-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

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? Don't they
know we can lose? They have half-assed educations that skipped
to the end of world war II, to where the evil racist US dropped a
nuke on Japan when we knew we would win all along. The reality
is that we could have lost that war, except for luck and stupidity
on the part of our enemies. Luck is not a method.

I'm watching the history channel as they show reenactments of
D-day, and if Hitler and Rommel had been slightly more on the
ball, the beaches could have been swept clear of Americans,
British and Canadians by German Panzers. It was misdirection
and a large dose of luck that kept that from being a bloodbath.
Then who knows what might have happened.

History is being written now and in 60 years victory may look
like it was easy and cheap. Only 3000 civilians in New York and
3000 soldiers in Iraq and Afganistan might turn the middle east
onto the course of democracy that might lead to an end of Islamic
extremism, or something else might tilt the other way and President
Clinton will wake up in 2009 and face the prospect of withdrawing
the bloody tatters of an american army through Jordan, followed
by victorious green banners of Islam sweeping away the west and
western thought.

I don't think that will happen (touch wood), but the idiots in the press
should think twice before slandering the people that keep the knife
from their throat.

[Michelle Malkin writes about this much better on her site, but I appreciate
the visits. I'm from New Orleans, so I've got a couple of good posts
from when I watched Katrina land, and from the election in 2004, so
feel free to take a look around.]

Livebloggin Deal or no deal

2006-06-05T19:39:00.000-07:00

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,
the camera panned slowly across a chunk of forest where there is
a "terror camp".]

Ooooh. 8 cases left including $750 and $5M. The offer should be
$320k...let's see what the banker says:....right after another commercial,
which is why I like this show at home on the DVR. $175k...seems low.
I'm probably the only person in canada watching this, the adjacent
rooms rattle with Hockey fans watching the stanley cup.

...ouch...she hit the $5M....owy. Better luck next year.

Travel bloggin'

2006-06-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

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, and called for a tug
to drag us to the gate. Each. Step. Was. Announced. By. The. Pilot.
But not in a good way to keep us informed, in a bad way to indicate
that this was our captain's first experience with something unusual
happening, in a sort of a "I see the top of the baby's head" kind of voice.

Well anyway, I'm here in calgary for a few days, sunset is around 10pm
local time, so I got a brief glimpse of the city...it looks like western kansas.
Rolling hills, with the city perched in a big bowl, the expectation of mountains
in the west.

It's gonna end bad

2006-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

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 comments that to me sound like they're nuts. Bush
comes up in a discussion at work, and people that I think are competent
professionals say things that make my hair stand on end.
(ie, bush was behind 911, it's the jooos, it's all about oil)

It appears that the only way to convince the left that there is a risk
of losing to the islamofacists is for us to lose.

Not an experiment I want to see run, but it seems more likely every
day.

Haditha slant in the press

2006-06-03T06:07:00.000-07:00

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 hate” and lost control before the massacre.
They've taken a one sentence quote and created an article around it, when that
wasn't the sense of the interview at all.

Much worse to me, is the accomanying photo with the times story. It shows
bound and blindfolded people shot dead against a wall with the caption:
"Victims in al-Haditha. The US is carrying out two inquiries (AP)"

I was shocked that there were photos of victims killed by marines,
bound and blindfolded, these guys must be guilty I thought and there
must be more photographic evidence. With a heavy heart I searched
google images for 'haditha', expecting to
find the entire massacre photo'd
from every angle. Instead I found the
same photo in this article
in newsweek, with the caption:
"Insurgents in Haditha executed
19 Shiite fishermen and National
Guardsmen in a sports stadium"

I think this goes beyond a slant,
this is slander. The times posted
a photo that shows "haditha victims"
in a story about marines killing
people in haditha, when they know
they stole the photo from an earlier
story about insurgents killing shiites
in Haditha.

I don't know what really happened to the marines in Haditha,
but I tend to believe their version more than the other side's
version and I'm willing to wait for the court martial for the
facts to come out before passing judgement.

When the moon is in the trees

2006-05-25T17:59:00.000-07:00

Acidman rises like the moon in the trees and pens blogger
poetry:

Did you ever see a DOZEN of those hairless salamanders in the North Carolina mountains--- up there where those prehistoric and skinless LIZARDS make a noise like a stameding herd of wild hogs when they run like lemmings into your CAMPFIRE AT NIGHT???? When the fucking MOON is in the trees?

When you didn't have to POKE them into the flames with your fire-stick as you screamed like a girl, and while your drunken buddies just kept snoring and left you to fend for yourself?? When those ick! ick! ick! things ran right across your farking LEG, and you pissed a stain in your pants, and the damn things KEPT RUNNING right into the fire? Where they curled up and resembled burnt popcorn?

Huh? Remember how stoned you were? And how you dragged a burnt lizard on a stick out of the fire, studied it for a moment, SNIFFED IT and ATE IT???? Just to see what it TASTED LIKE??? To see if you COULD??

When you follow the moon, you can do some crazy shit.

Economics, wages and osmotic pressure

2006-05-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds links to a good article that describes the
mexican economic reason for the flood of immigration and
why south america is moving leftward politically.

Apart from the macro-economics, croneyism and lack
of education, another big driver for the northern migration
is low pay and the way that people in mexico are paid.
People are paid flat salaries (salario fijo) with a per month wage,
and are expected to work the hours necessary to get the job
done.

During the 10 days I just spent in mexico, we had two company
drivers who were on duty for the same number of hours as me.
Working from 6 in the morning until 10 at night is pretty normal
in the oilfield during drilling operations, and we get paid well for
that. The drivers picked us up, drove us around all day then
brought us back to the hotel, then drove back to the cheap hotel
they stayed at. (not my idea)

They make a flat wage for that, and the minimum wage in mexico
is 50 pesos per day. One driver said his cousin is working in the US
and working two jobs and in 4 months has saved enough to buy a house
in Villahermosa.

Just do the math and it's easy to see the osmotic pressure-like force
driving people northward. Even if you get paid $3/hour here, but you
work 16 hours per day you can make $48 dollars per day, which comes
out to 500 pesos per day or 10 times what they make in Mexico, and
they aren't working that much more in the US than in Mexico.
You'd have to be a fool not to come up to the US, and if I were in
their shoes I'd do it too.

The best fence in the universe won't keep people out with that kind of
force behind it, witness the transport of drugs. Anytime there is a huge
profit margin like this wage differential, the drugs or the people will get
through.

One possible answer is to not just 'give' mexico a guest worker program,
we should ask that low wage workers in mexico be given the opportunity
to select a per hour wage, as well as demanding economic reforms to make
mexico's economy more like Chile's and less like, Mexico's.

The Pres speaks too soon

2006-05-15T18:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to see the speech, but I read it on instapundit, and
he linked to it on video here. I liked it, it agrees fairly well with
what I'd like to see and in a more rational world it might even
pass congress.

I think it's too soon though, he should have waited until after
the mexican presidential elections in two months. Now the
radical presidential candidate will be able to cherry pick items
from the speech to demand mexican immigrant rights, and
get votes.

It's also too soon because I'm still in Mexico, he could have waited
two days until I'm safely across the rio grande to give this speech.
I'm sure the spit content of my food will spiral out of control in
the next 48 hours. Oh well.

From the renaissance to the end of western thought

2006-05-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

When I planned our recent
vacation I thought that we'd
stop at places where I could
point out the what happened
in the trajectory of history,
from Rome to Venice to Florence
to Paris. From Ancient Rome
to the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance and up to the
modern age. Maybe my wife
and I could learn something
while vacationing.

I really didn't know enough art
history to know that the beginning
of the Renaissance could be
localized to a city, and a person.

The doors in this picture were
installed in the Baptistry in front of the Cathedral in Florence.
They were designed after a competion between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi
and several others to decide who would design the bronze doors.
Ghiberti won the competition and designed and made these doors,
with scenes from the old testament. The work took 20 years, and
the panels change from the flat perspective of medieval art to 3d
perspective of the renaissance. Ghiberti then went on to design
the "gates of paradise", which are the doors on the side of the baptistry
facing the cathedral. Brunelleschi gave up metalwork and art,
and learned architecture. He designed the Cathedral dome,
which is a story from a motivation course, when life gives you lemons,
build a giant lemon shaped dome and amaze the world.

It amazed me that all these events happened in one town, so quickly
after 800 years of things not changing. Similar times as today, where
I remember not having color TV as a boy...and right now I'm listening
to phil collins on my ipod while blogging on a wireless network in my
mexican hotel room.

The downside of change is that I just watched a show on TV where a
tattoed idiot paid another idiot to shoot him to create "body art".

Photoblogging italian art

2006-05-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo from
the roof of the Sistine
chapel that my wife
took while the guards
shouted "Silence,
no photos!" I thought
at the time how much
it must suck to work
in the most beautiful
room in the western
hemisphere, and your
job is to say "Silence,
no photos!" every 45
seconds.

We made two trips through there, once with a tour group and the 2nd
time by ourselselves, truly awe inspiring. Made me not want to see any
more art after that day.

Funniest. Screed. Ever.

2006-05-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

James Lileks outdoes himself with a letter from the Iranian
President to Bush:

. . and Jack Bauer will not be able to save you this time, my friend. If there is an attack on our country we will double our aid to the Iraqi patriots, double our funding to Hezbollah and its female auxiliary wing Sisboombah, and double again our attempts to secrete through your borders weapons both chemical and biological.
Ah – er, reduce everything I said in the previous paragraph by half. We will START doing those things. Yes, that is the thing that is the ticket: start. We will also use our fearsome weapons of unspeakable lethality to destroy your planes before they are even built, let alone launched. We can sink your mighty aircraft carriers by shouting in unison, so great is our national will.

Yes, that thing is the ticket. Go read the whole thing.