Open Choke

"Oil Is Dumb"

That was the message on the bumper sticker pasted on the car in front of me.

Of course, it is doubtful that said car was being driven by an electrical engineer or physicist who had somehow conquered the myriad issues revolving around battery technology or low cost harnessing of earth or space forces.  

 

More likely, it was driven by some under-educated fundamentalist thinker of some sort.  

 

In any case, it crossed my mind that it is a sure bet that they buy more of the dumb product I find and sell than I buy of the presumably smart product they sell.  Furthermore, I bet that nearly evryone needs and value what I make and sell more than they value what they make and sell.

 

I mean, I wouldn't be dickish enough to put a bumper sticker on my car that reads "Pottery is Dumb".

The kind of thinking that makes me crazy...

I picked up an Austin Chronicle on my trip to our State Capitol last week.  The Chronicle is the Austin "progressive" weekly that is actually a pretty good read, mostly because the editor, a guy named Louis Black, while not sharing many of my own views, seems analytical and non-hystrical in his opinion pieces.

In any case, it is always the Letters to the Editors in these publications that drive me crazy.  In one this week, a furious woman wrote how someone had deposited into a dumpster a dead dog wrapped in plastic.  She wrote something to the effect that it was "everyones hope, animal or human, to have a dignified burial", and she was furious that neither the police department nor the animal control department in Austin would jump to at her phone call and provide some sort of more diginifed provisioning of this poor perished pooch. 

Think about it a second. 

She calls various government agencies to deal with an issue that is not only quite subjective, but apparently doesn't even consider consigning the cursed canineto HER backyard!

The idea seems to be that "we need to do something about this!  So long as it isn't me doing it".

GE is the new Halliburton

The Obama administration has IT'S Halliburton... you know, a company that lobbies and games the ssystem for access, power, and money... and that company is GE.  Look at their political giving, and look at what they get back in return.  What an ROI...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955_pf.html

Plus, an effective trillion dollar subsidy for their overpriced turbines and green energy products.  These guys make Halliburton and Cheney look like pikers inTHEIR manipulation of government.

Democrats First, Constituents Second

Ok, I can see why a lot of Democrats might support the Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill.  It puts ultimate power over American Industry in the hands of Federal bureaucrats... it is the Democratic end game, really.  What I can't understand is how a Texas Democrat could support this pap smear of a Bill.  This Bill puts a gun to the head of Texas  and pulls the trigger.

These are those folks.  Democrat First, Texan Last.  Remember come November. Hold them accountable.

Gene Green (Houston) 

Henry Cuellar (Laredo)

Lloyd Doggett (Austin)

Sheila JAckson Lee (Houston)

Ruben Hinojosa (Mercedes)

Charles Gonzalez (San Antonio)

Silvestre Reyes (El Paso)

Eddie Bernice Johnson (Dallas)

Al Green (Houston).

I hope your vote come back to choke each of you.  I hope each of you gets to experience private life under the rules you impose on the rest of us.  Wouldn't THAT be delightful!

Iron(ic) Man

Deliciously, Debt-Free America declared bankruptcy. Heh heh.

Bust A Cap (and Trade) in Yo' Ass

Since I no longer find the Congress has ANY limits to dispicable power-grab behaviors, I don't know why I am surprised that it would try to ram down the biggest tax and control on every industry ever conceived in our country without debate, without presentation to committee, and, from most accounts, without even having been read by the folks voting on it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

For every Democrat friend that warned me about how Evil Republicans could maybe possibly perhaps try to use the Patriot Act to take away my Civil Liberties, I say "What in the Hell is your party doing?  I have lost more in the last 6 months than I have lost in my entire life, and it is all part of the crazy people that have highjacked the once-great Democratic Party.

Peak Unemployment?

My favorite part of the week is when Our President speaks of the jobs he has "created" thus far.  

Of course, there is no real measurment for this, which means he and his team are "making it all up". Out of whole cloth!  

I ran across this graph showing his "economic team's" prognosis for his stimulus reduction, along with ACTUAL results thus far.  Their prognosis is another example of making stuff up out of reams and reams of whole cloth.  Perhaps silk or velvet, because it is very smoooooth....

Good OIPA Joke...

One ol' oilman talking to another at the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association meeting...

"How do you know when you've got enough money?"

"I dunno.  How?"

"When your wife or your kids come home and say 'I'm an Environmentalist'!"

Hysterical!

The Preventative Principle...

Perfectly named.  Luddite to its core.  It is a defining principle of todays Environmental Movement and the reason people want to regulate things even if they are not a statistical problem.  It's quite simple.  We shouldn't do something if we cannot ascertain all outcomes and de-risk it entirely.  It is the defining principle behine Pelosi's statement in China a couple of weeks ago that we, as a people, are entering an era where we need to measure and account for everything.  Control.  The Manna, the Mothers Milk, of those that seek to rule us.  If for nothing else, just so to rule us.

Great examples of Preventative Principle at work through the ages.  The crazy lady with 1000 cats that hasn't left her house in 7 years for fear that someone will "get" her.  

Kim Jong Il,  God forbid his people eat or that freedom enters his grey land.  The Principality equivalent to the Cat Lady and the Principle.

They guy who can never make up his mind because it might be the wrong choice.

You know, people that DON'T DO ANYTHING!  Broken humans.  Broken humans that want to impose their brokeness on the rest of us.  Festivus!

At its core, it is the most destructive neutron bomb of a philosophy ever dropped on mankind.  Conservative at its very core.  Don't do anything new, because it might have bad consequences that we cannot foresee.  The Preventative Principle would have us live in caves, except that caves might collapse, and still warm ourselves with fire, but that fire might get out of hand.

Oh well.  Saw a T-shirt on a young guy downtown Sunday.  It said "Fish are FRIENDS, not FOOD". Huh.  Tell that to a shark.

Regulating Frac'ing...

With only a handful of proven incidents of induced fracturing affecting an aquifer, out of literally hundreds of thousands of induced frac jobs over the last century, environmentalists are in a frenzy to regulate this "harmful activity".  

This is the way of government today.  Induced frac'ing is safer than the Space Shuttle program by nearly three orders of magnitude (1:100,000 vs 1:126).  For some reference on how "problematic" this is, if you live a long and wonderful life, you have a 1 in 3000 chance of being struck by lightning sometime during that lifetime.

Environmentalists want to regulate induced frac'ing because they want to stop oil and gas drilling in the US, end, period and paragraph.  Journalists that propagate this nonsense are in league with the anti-oil and gas folks.  Or maybe they are just stupid.  They don't require much math or science for a journalism career these days.

As Ronald Reagan once said... "Government's philosophy seems to be that if it works, regulate it, if it keeps working, tax it, if it quits working, subsidize it".  Never more than today can we see the governmental mechanations that inspired the Gipper to that quote.