Far South of I-10

I've spent the past week up in Newark, which is in Lincolnshire. It's a nice little town with a pub for approximately every person and lots of restauraunts, but no internet access. Dial-up won't work from the hotel, they have no broadband and there are no internet cafes. Future business idea...internet cafe in Newark. This weekend I came down to London to sightsee, I'm writing on what appears to be a 486 or pentium I at the hotel's business center. The city is packed with people for the easter holiday, I didn't manage to get into any major tourist sites, but I took some pictures. no usb port on this pc...so I'll post them tomorrow. Anyway, I love the trains and underground here. I took a fast train down from newark, one that when it whooshes through the station you have to wonder if if will suck you off the platform. I zipped around on the underground yesterday, if houston wasn't built on mud it would be so cool to have the same kind of rail netwo...

I'm headed to the UK today to help teach a course for work. Since I'll be there 5 weeks I'll hopefully get a couple of days to do tourist and I'll try and post some of the pictures here. I picked up a 512 meg memory card at best buy for 35 dollars, so I should be able to get at least one or two displayable photos.

My wife and I were just discussing American history. She is trying to get her american citizenship, and to do so she has to pass a test on history and culture. The sample questions are pretty simple, eg, who is George Washington, and when was the declaration of independance signed? Just naming people and dates as history is difficult for me, so instead I launched into a summarized american history, from the declaration of independance to 1800. The unfortunate metaphor I chose for the colonies defeating Imperial Britain was, what it would be like if the insurgents in Iraq were to defeat the U.S. . Even though it brings bile to my throat to think of it, it might be a similar scale defeat (neglecting the french helping the insurgents in both wars). But then I spoke about the declaration of independance. Who signed it and why. What the last line says: " And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to e...

In case anyone is wondering, before you get offended by the title, coonass is just another name for cajun, but can also include the non-cajun rednecks of southern louisiana. A better explanation here: http://www.coonass.com/whycoon.htm

The NYtimes has a story about a report that says how poorly afghanistan is doing: ANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 21 - Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and vowed to rebuild, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the United Nations 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations. I'm sure it's terrible there in Afghanistan, but the story seems to be a not so subtle dig at the US using a story that doesn't make the numbers it is based on transparent. Of course this is pretty normal for the news today, so my more practiced google skills quickly bring out a few links: Calculation of the HDI (I can't paste it, it won't let me do a copy paste out of acrobat) It's a combination of three indexes, life expectancy index, GDP index and educational attainment index. These things are indexed using the formula (max-actual)/(max-min) then combined. Of course in a country like afganistan, t...

Mary Madigan is posting over at Micheal Totten's weblog about a report from the Freedom House that exposes Saudi funded religious extremism in mosques here in the U.S. One excerpt: The Saudi literature is bent on instilling in its followers the conviction that whenever they are not in Saudi Arabia or other Islamic countries, they are in enemy territory and accordingly should struggle to establish Islam, or else return to the Islamic world. A Saudi-government text [Document No. 32] for tenth-grade students entitled Science of Tawheed, copies of which were obtained at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas, teaches the impropriety of mixing with, or imitating, the unbelievers. “Residing among the unbelievers continuously is also forbidden because it is dangerous for the belief of the Muslim. That is why Allah made it obligatory to emigrate from the land of disbelief to the land of Islam.” [Document No. 32] The message is that the peaceful coexistence of Muslim and non-Muslim in a m...

Wretchard at the Belmont club is discussing why the left sees the current US government or maybe the west as the enemy. The "Left's inability to see" -- is the product of their unshakeable belief in the immutability of their world whose safety is guaranteed by the very system they hate the most. In that make-believe garden, academic tenure, human-rights lawyers, newspaper articles and political correctness will always protect them. They are dimly aware of, but do not really believe in the existence an outside world governed by what Tom Friedman called Hama Rules , of which the explosive laden ambulance is a part. Hama Rules is Friedman's shorthand for how Syrians dealt with rebels in the city of Hama. They leveled it. Literally. I've never understood how there can be people here in this country who can wish for US failure in Iraq, who could possibly say 'the enemy of my enemy (bush) is my friend (Iraqi insurgents, islamofacists, etc). I r...

Popular Mechanics has a fantastic article debunking many of the myths of 9/11, including the questions of why the Air Force didn't shoot down the airliners. Whenever I've tried to explain to people that an air force base might have 70 planes sitting on the ramp, but only 2 planes sitting on alert armed and ready to fly; and only some bases even have planes on alert, most don't. I don't know how many arguments I've had with people who said it's obvious that Bush knew beforehand about the 9/11 attacks, who would then cite all the issues debunked in this article. Yeah MSM!

They say that when it comes to breakfast, a chicken that supplies the eggs is dedicated, while the pig that supplies the bacon is committed. Since I'm still a chicken I added some links to some renewable energy sites on the sidebar. Just a couple of links to some training sites; solarpower.org is where I attended a one week pv installation class that was very good. I'm still not a big enough pig to spend actual money to install any RE technology on my house, or start a long dreamed of, never done solar power business. Oh well. I also added the first of many links on climate change. These first two sites are like me skeptical. To say that 'consensus' has been reached among scientists is disingenuous, since both of these sites include articles from scientists that don't agree with either the direction or magnitude of climate change, Or are arguing that the 'proof' of the hockey stick graph was conjured out of statistics. By definition, if someone is argu...

I just spent the day at my Aunt Alma's funeral. The really saddening thing about the funeral was that she always seemed to be the person in charge of all the previous funerals, either for my grandmother or my aunts and uncles who went before her, or any other event for that matter. For some reason I expected to see her there at the funeral home, saying something like "here comes My Joe" as I walked in. Until we arrived at the funeral home and she wasn't there, her death hadn't really sunk in. She was always funny, with a sarcastic wit that could zap the skin off of the unwary. And she was always kind, she invited all of us, brothers, sisters and cousins over to her house every year at July 4th and labor day to go swimming. Apparently we weren't the richest family in the world, since swimming in Aunt Alma's swimming pool provided the heights of several summers that I can remember. Anyway, it turns out that Gin and gatorade mix pretty well. wh...

I'm watching the apprentice, and I think this version is a lot worse than the first two years. These people don't look like they've ever worked, much less been a group of super-successful lawyer-business Trump clones. Yeah, I know the high school graduates aren't lawyer Trump clones, but they couldn't be business Trump clones either. I thought that in the first two seasons some of the characters appeared pretty competent, sometimes they just played the game, letting the project leaders do all the work and take the blame. These two groups don't look like they could manage their way out of a paper bag. best conversation: girl1:"You can't talk to me that way! girl2:"*^&$%*(*!!!!..... How 'bout if I talk to you that way?!" Danny's web site: http://www.kastner.com/ (Leisure suit dude. Who says he's in marketing, but I bet he's a spam king based on the marketing he did in the first episode. Marketing. Righ...

I've been sick with a fairly bad cold the past few days, so I've probably watched around 50 hours of TV since Friday. Besides the obvious downsides of watching so much TV, I've also seen the commercial for the movie "Hide and Seek" around 100 times. Not only does that look a piece of crap movie (why deniro why?), it looks like a copy of an episode of Southpark. The one where Stan's Aunt Flo (who visits every month) gives Stan a goldfish that turns out to be a demonic killer from an alternate universe. (" I've got such a good boy" says stan's mother as she buries the fish's latest victim in the backyard) Hide and seek has some writing appearing on a wall behind a bathtub, which to me looks just like the south park fish blowing on the aquarium wall, then writing spooky messages to Stan. A quick google gives some secrets from the show. The spookyfish part of the show has it's roots in The Bad Seed (1956), which is one ...

I've had discussions with people about the Iraq war and the war on terror, people with opinions as diverse as: "It's all a conspiracy to steal oil, or build a pipeline, etc" to the" nuke 'em all" crowd. Usually my opinion is greeted with horror when I say thatI think it is going to end bad. Bad being several cities in the USA being nuked closely followed by most of the middle east being nuked. Maybe followed by more nuclear exchanges until we end up as the cast of a mid 80's post-apocalyptic movie. Jerry Pournelle makes a point today in a discussion of about nation building in Iraq: The American people are warlike, particularly the Scots-Irish and German populations; but we are also Christian and ashamed of being war-like; so if we go to war, it must be for a Good Cause against an Evil which Provoked Us into War, and thus the Evil must be destroyed By Any Means Necessary. Which is why we could bomb Tokyo and kill over 100,000 with one fire ...

A friend of mine asked in the comments if the war in Iraq is still justified since no WMD's were ever found. From past experience I know that I can never prove to anyone opposed to this war's satisfaction that it was the right thing to do, or the moral thing to do. It's the same as arguing religion. I can try to argue against the negative case though, and here's one attempt: Some arguments against war, and this war: - All war is wrong and immoral - This war is wrong because it is illegal - This war is wrong because it is the wrong war in the wrong place in the wrong time. All war is wrong and immoral. This is the pacifist's argument and is completely viable in a world where there are no violent people or countries. It's a beautiful thing to be a pacifist, as long as you are willing to watch someone kill your family, friends and neighbors and do nothing. Once you are willing to fight, then it is just a question of who, what and when you a...

I was just watching CNN's Tsunami coverage, they were reporting from the deck of an Indian Hospital ship, and interviewing some government officials who were preening about 11 ships of the Indian Navy helping Sri Lanka. Maybe I'm over-sensitive to media bias, and the general anti-US slant worldwide and in the news, but they sure seemed to be implying we should have more ships than India over there (we probably do). As if India is projecting it's might around the world, instead of across a narrow straight to ceylon. I'm sure the next big news story will be how the US didn't set up a Tsunami warning system to provide warnings to the people of the Indian ocean. There will be much gavel banging as people demand to know why they weren't protected, and why the US didn't do it's job as world fireman as well as world policeman. (I guess we'll soon have all the crappy world jobs, world building-code inspector, world garbageman, etc) In hindsight it wou...

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

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

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

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

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