Saturday, July 10, 2010

Meanwhile, a reminder a moratorium doesn't mean that less drilling will happen. It just won't happen here. Even though the moratorium has been stayed by the courts, uncertainty over the ultimate decision makes drillers reluctant to spend money drilling when it may be stopped without completion.

As I was watching a program called Big, Bigger, Biggest the use of suction anchors was described. These are large cylinders closed at one end fitted with hoses to suck out the air and water inside, which caused outside pressure to drive it down into the sea bottom. Something similar could be placed over the out side of a well with the drill string down the center.

This thing may be a huge loss, but it would be a good opportunity to try new ideas at 1 mile depths for security and preventing blow outs usinging wiring and hoses that can be severed by a blow out, making the Blowout Preventer useless.

There's a pair of Russian submersibles that can reach 6,000 feet deep. That doesn't really prove that they can shut down the well when they get there, but I'd like to see them try. And why doesn't the entire off shore drilling industry have anything like this?

Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’. Good, but how does that put a halt to the Mexican drug cartels, killings and drug smuggling? The only positive thing about illegal immigration was that they were able to work and make life better for their families. Most of us demanding better defense of the borders were in favor of allowing more legal immigrants.

Ouch!

How dumb is Obama?
How-many-Obamas-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb dumb.
Follow the link for the answer.

How is Illegal Immigration Different from Invasion?

My last post got me wondering how WWII would have turned out if we hadn't established any lines and just allowed the Germans and Japanese, et al. to walk past our troops as long as they dressed like civilians and kept their weapons out of sight.

Suddenly, we realize that France is even more occupied than when we started? What is being argued in defense of the current situation is that absurd. The first thing that make you a sovereign nation is establishing borders. There have been fights between states (not in the Civil War) over boundaries. Then there was West Virginia which refused to secede along with the rest of Virginia. Cities, counties and states get in serious feuds all the time over boundaries, usually when rivers or lakes change their courses or shorelines. Imagine taking a case like that to the Supreme Court and having them tell you it won't take any action and neither can you.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Jimmy Carter is bad enough,

but when Amity Shlaes says you're threatening to repeat FDR's economic missteps, you might consider firing all of your advisers and start finding ways to cut public spending. If you still think FDR was an economic genius, you need to read her book, The Forgotten Man.

Too many economists talk in a kind of argot that normal people don't understand, but we can understand that government is not a profitable enterprise, except for private businesses who manipulate it for competitive advantage. Wealth is what everybody else creates and pays taxes on. Government is a necessary evil that needs to be minimized and restricted to those functions that are necessary, such as defense of the nation, guaranteeing freedom to compete fairly and protecting the rights of citizens both individual and collective. I can see the need to conduct foreign policy, regulating commerce (under which I would expect prohibitions of boycotts by individual states and municipalities of each other and of political subdivisions offering refuge to violators of national laws) and protecting our borders, which seems a self-evident part of national defense.

Friday, July 09, 2010

New "Ultra-Battery" as Energy-Dense as High Explosives Remember those problems with overheating Lithium ion batteries? What could go wrong?

Peggy Noonan seems to be losing her edge. Her column this week, about how Republicans still need to show that they understand the message of the Tea Party movement, is obvious and behind the curve. Worse, it's the sort of thing she's probably hearing from friends like Chris Matthews. She's a good speech writer, but she doesn't have Ronald Reagan to provide the message she puts into words anymore, and without that, she doesn't seem to have anything to inspire her rhetoric.

Of course, the Republicans aren't making any good news to accompany the successes of the Tea Party movement, so what else is there to say about them? We're watching a vacuum of leadership. People are fed up with Hope and Change, that doesn't deliver, but nobody out there seems to have new ideas that the media recognizes. Of course, conservatives/libertarians are still the ones with ideas that work, but they're not really new ones, and what's new about that? Nothing to send a thrill up Chris Matthews' leg.

The think that Reagan had was the ability to highlight the greatness of America's basic principles, liberty, free enterprise, property rights, self-government and the ability of free people to create a better life. "Progressives," true to the irony with which they name all their efforts, only know how to complain about what we haven't achieved, but have only vague or dishonest proposals for improving things. Hence, their promises fail or only make things worse.

What we need, along with more inspiring leaders, is a more realistic electorate. When politicians start promising hope, change, a new deal, or anything new, for that matter, our eyes should roll. I might like Ron Paul, if he weren't arguing for foreign policy based on George Washington's farewell address. The world is too unstable for us to act like we still have to play below the radar of Britain and France, or Russia, China and Persia, for that matter.

If he keeps appointing radicals how can he NOT be a radical himself. He promised to "remake America," which, given his more specific proposals, should have told us that his remaking would come at the expense of economic prosperity. The amount of harm single party government can do is truly scary, especially when the media has sold out to the party in control.

Obama's approval numbers are down, but not nearly as low as they deserve to be. The fact that he can still claim 46% approval in the Real Clear Politics polling average after the past year makes me wonder if anybody is paying attention.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

I was in high school during the 1960s when everybody seemed to be singing protest songs, but I don't recall anybody ever getting death threats over them. Maybe it's because she names Obama in the song, but Don Henley, in his song "The End of the Innocence" refers to "this tired old man that we elected king," obviously Ronald Reagan, and nobody threatened Henley's life.

The latest way humans are destroying Mother Earth that you won't see the left, environmentalist, feminists getting on the band wagon for.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Become more like Europe, get rid of air conditioning and save the planet!

Surprise! Hypocrisy and No Change!

"Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies." In fact, his administration defended them in court.
Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore oil drilling.

The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea, relying on an "irrational" environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling.

The April 2009 ruling stunned both the administration and the oil industry, and threatened to delay or cancel dozens of offshore projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision. Politically, it needed to push ahead with conventional oil production while it expanded support for renewable energy.
Be sure to check out the accompanying graphic titled "Risky Design?"

Monday, July 05, 2010

Preposterous!

Republicans would never recruit some loser to run as a Democrat! They'd recruit him as chairman of the RNC.

More hope and change, 1932 style!

Get out the flip-flops!

Democrats who've been lying to us about how successful their first Stimulus was, have switched to warning about a worsening economy unless they pass another one. Here's a better idea: throw them all out of office and elect fiscal conservatives.

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Don't we have a spare Predator or two for this guy?

Happy Fourth of July!

Let's all remember that we're celebrating independence, not merely freedom. They are related, but not identical, concepts. If we abuse our freedoms and privileges, we'll have no one else to blame if we lose our independence.

The Inside Story of the Tea Party Movement's Success!

Nile Gardiner:
America is sinking under Obama’s towering debt
The only real question left is whether we can dump him or at least his dominating majorities in Congress in time to halt more damage. You'd think he'd have begun to doubt some of his easy nostrums by now, but he's either obsessively attached to his belief that he's being sabotaged by Republicans or he's just not all that bright.

KSL radio is dropping the Sean Hannity program. It's a 50,000 watt station, owned by the LDS church. I think it may feel a need to become more moderate for its core audience along the Wasatch Front (from Ogden south to wherever the population drops off). I think Utah is still basically conservative. There's a lot of ideological overlap between the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party here, but you can only swallow so much red meat before you start thinking about something else. Whatever the reason, Hannity won't be off the air here for long, and the left shouldn't see this as a big victory.

Hannity's been on in the afternoon for a long time, but I never listened to him. I live on the wrong side of the Wasatch Mountains and so reception is poor here, but I've never listened to confrontational talk shows for very long. Sooner or later you've heard their entire repertoire and it just gets boring. I don't know how Rush Limbaugh has done it.

Thank goodness for Reuters

Without it we'd never get such banal headlines as this: Afghan war at critical stage, says Petraeus

At what point is a war NOT at a critical stage? As long as Obama is President, this will be at a critical stage, and maybe thereafter. Anyplace in the region where government control is absent is a potential refuge for terrorists to gather, train and export suicide attackers. Any neglected, isolated area can become toxic if we don't catch it in time. This is a long term effort. We can't put a time limit on it, because once we pull out, if we leave a vacuum, it will be filled by people who wish us harm. That's all pretty obvious, or should be.

Is it just me?

Or does that logo for DailyKosTV look more Marxist or Fascist than anything else?

I thought Obama's posters looked that way too, except that they were red, white and blue. In politics in this country you've got to have red, white and blue.

Hey, let's wait and see!

Obama's attacks on Republicans might still turn things around. Right?

Right?

Charles Krauthammer examines the PC compulsion that prevents Obama and Eric Holder from calling terrorists terrorists. I've never understood the point of worrying about offending people who have openly announced their intent to kill Americans and pretty much everybody else and then actually done so or failed only through ineptitude. Is this supposed to reassure them that we're not really their enemies? If so, it's not working, except to make the rest of us feel that their hearts aren't really into defending America.