Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

Recession

Recession is an ugly word for politicians, and most of whom can be trusted to not utter it at all. So goes our President Ostrich, blissfully telling us that because indicators x and y are not negative, we're not in recession. Well, a kid in the sixth grade who reads newspapers or watches CNBC or FNN could tell you that the indicators have been "cooked" to the point that we could be in a full-blown Depression and today's indicators wouldn't even have us in Recession yet.

Well, we're in a Recession. How do I know, the one who freely admits to almost flunking bonehead Econ in college?

Warren Buffet says so. In case you don't know him or just got in from Planet Zargon, Warren Buffet is the country's richest man, and got that way by astute investment.

Mr. Buffet says we're in a Recession, so we're in a Recession.

NRA's next shill (UPDATED)

...isn't for gun rights, it's selling WINE for $6.99/bottle, which is either a loss-leader or it's "two-buck Chuck" and not worth swilling.

Am I the ONLY one who thinks that the NRA is like a kid in a candy store here? They are absolutely nutso with their mailing list. They are worse than Publisher's Clearing House.

Does anyone out there have a clue as to who I might direct a polite letter to within that benighted organization? A person who actually gives a rip about how we feel about our NRA?

Perhaps a movement to boycott this year's convention is in order.

You will note that I haven't even mentioned the propriety of an organization supposedly devoted to teaching gun safety selling alcoholic beverages....

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UPDATE: 042808 2106 PDT: Just when you thought the NRA couldn't get worse, I open my mail and there is a letter, dated 4/12/08, asking me to renew my membership. Fine. Except my current membership extends until 11/30/08, or over seven months from the date of this letter of renewal. I have zero other memberships in anything that would ask me to renew an annual membership when I had over half of it remaining. Not only that, but the letter, signed by Wayne LaPierre, who I USED to respect, tries to lay a guilt trip on me if I don't renew this early:

"Also, you'll save the NRA the cost of sending more notices. That means more of your dues can go directly to critical NRA projects including our safety programs, our crime-fighting efforts and, most important, our fight to save your guns!!!"

OK, Mr. LaPierre, here's a flash for you: I don't want you to save my guns, I want you to help save my gun rights. There IS a difference, and you don't seem to notice that difference much. My guns aren't going anywhere without my OK, but under the NRA's stewardship, my gun rights have been steadily eroding.

Oh, and while I'm responding to your letter, let me add that it's YOUR CHOICE to send me all these early renewal notices which incur you additional administrative overhead expense. I know perfectly well when my membership dues are due, thank you, and rest assured that you will get them sometime in November.

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A little culture help, please

OK, I crossed culture lines and went to an upscale, very hip Martini Bar yesterday. Actually, I'm renting the establishment to throw a swank cocktail party for my youngest daughter, who is graduating from Oregon Health & Sciences University Medical School 6/3, and starting her medical practice there (as an Intern, then Resident Doctor, in OHSU's Trauma-Level ER on 6/15). So, if you get shot, knifed or run over on the west side of the city, she might very well be the first one asking you if it hurts. Heh-heh, EMT joke from the old days.

At the upscale, very hip Martini Bar (in the upscale, very hip Pearl District of Portland), the hip patrons (and the publicans as well) all sport various forms of piercings of the face and wherever else, and tattoos.

Lots of tattoos. It's "Portland Ink" down there in the former industrial district.

The gal who took our drink orders on the sidewalk had most of her entire upper body tattooed. The Pink Gin I had was delicious, and so was the look of her chest.

So, here's the question, and it crosses cultural lines:

Is it OK to stare at a lady's tattooed chest long enough to appreciate the form and the art of the intricate tattoos thereon?

Of course, your blogger has mastered the deceptive male head-turn maneuver, wherein my head turns so as to appear to be breaking the gaze, but the nystagmus of my eyes still tracks the object of interest, giving the appearance that I'm NOT staring at those womanly attributes. The VariLux darkening eyeglasses make this maneuver almost foolproof out of doors.

I don't think I should have to use the head-turn maneuver though. I think that if a lady has a bountiful AND artfully-decorated bosom, I should be able to openly hold my gaze on it. Especially if she's a publican in a rather revealing peasant blouse.

Here's my rationale. It is, of course, improper to stare at a lady's chest, per se (the chest itself). However, isn't it also impolite NOT to appreciate art that someone has gone to considerable time, money and pain to be able to display? I say the appreciation factor outweighs the older custom of politeness.

What say you?

Here we go again

More of AlGore's Revenge:

Yep, that's a warning for snow, a foot in the mountains and a few inches in the foothills. Excuse me, but isn't the Merry Month of May just two days away?

...ANOTHER ROUND OF SNOW COMING TO THE MOUNTAINS OF SOUTHWEST
WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THIS
WEEK..

COLD SPRING WEATHER IS TAKING HOLD OVER SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON AND
NORTHWEST OREGON AGAIN DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THIS WEEK.

ANOTHER RATHER COLD SYSTEM IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC WILL LOWER SNOW
LEVELS TO BELOW CASCADE PASS ELEVATIONS TONIGHT...THEN DOWN TO
AROUND 2000 FEET TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY.

SNOW ACCUMULATIONS IN THE CASCADES COULD REACH 6 TO 12 INCHES
BEGINNING LATE TONIGHT AND CONTINUING TUESDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY.

SNOW ACCUMULATIONS ABOVE ABOUT 2000 FEET IN THE COASTAL
MOUNTAINS...THE CASCADE FOOTHILLS...AND THE UPPER HOOD RIVER
VALLEY COULD REACH A COUPLE OF INCHES AS WELL.

IF YOU ARE PLANNING TRAVEL THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS OF SOUTHWEST
WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE
WEEK...BE PREPARED FOR WINTER LIKE DRIVING CONDITIONS AGAIN.

It won't be fun boating in this slop on Saturday. It also won't be as much fun breaking in my new gas BBQ pit. Oh, well, at least the brewskis stay cold longer.

Scam alert!

First it was "Carbon Credits", the Ponzi Scheme of all time, now it's "Vetroleum"

Read this article. Read it knowing it has been written to bamboozle the reader.

Let's take some principles of the old "snake oil" type of scam and see if we can find them here.

1. Find everything a new name to make an older process (in this case, making biodiesel) seem like a breakthrough. We start with the very catchy word "Vetroleum". No, that's not correct. we should start with the reference "biocrude". It doesn't exist. Crude oil is a specific substance, namely petroleum oil pumped right out of the ground. It is "crude" or un-refined. There is no such thing as "bio-crude". If you are going to make biodiesel, you start with raw materials called biomass. At some point in your very long (not "8-minute") reaction, the substance you are cooking down in the presence of reagents, at high pressure, takes on characteristics of a long-chain oil molecule. You may then refine that substance, once it is fractionated (distilled and the fractional compounds removed) in the process (which is not called a "time reaction", it's Catalytic Cracking) into other products (in this case, they seemed to have refined it down into a form of volatile fuel usable as gasoline, but that is a HUGE waste of time, refining equipment and energy, it should be left at the earlier state where it resembles diesel).

2. Get impressive-sounding groups to push your snake oil for you. In this case, they've gotten the "Central American Parliament" on their payroll. Read about the CAP here, it seems to be a club that talks about economics, mostly, and wants to be a super-government like the European Union, but isn't recognized as such. Then get a "Large Corporation" with an impressive name to package your product. Here we find US Sustainable Energy Corporation, whose stock is listed here. That's right, it's a Penny Stock, in this case trading for a little over two cents per share, and three-quarters of the impressive looking 1.3 billion shares are restricted (and may not exist). The capitalization of their UNRESTRICTED stock (Book Value) is less than $750,000.

3. Finally you locate in place known for it's involvement (in energy here), and enlist well-known local government leaders to help you push your product. Baytown-Sugarland in Chambers County, Texas isn't exactly on the cusp of energy production these days. I was down in that area a few weeks ago, in Dickinson, and there didn't appear to be much in the way of energy production going on. Some old oilfields are being drilled for gas now, but that's about the extent of it. My guess is that the Chambers County Commissioner cited in the article isn't exactly an oil baron, either.

Nope, this is a scam designed to line the pockets of a few folks who get in early, and all the rest of the suckers who get in at the end are going to get nada as investors. Maybe this refinery will produce a few barrels of biofuel, but you wouldn't want to have to pay their production costs, and somehow, those aren't even talked about in the article, are they?

The world is going to see many, many fast-buck operators in the biofuel arena in the coming years. This is just one of the earlier ones, that's all.

H/T to the EllTee for this one.

Messing around in Boats...

...I've quoted it dozens of times, but I can't remember who said that bit about "messing around in boats"...but good on him!

It's time (according to the calendar), that the boating season start, and in fact, the Columbia River Yachting Association Opening Day boat parade is a scarce week away. I sit at the marina, and eyeball the snowpack at a bare thousand feet in the Coast Range, and was in this snow last week. It doesn't LOOK like boating season, but looks can be deceiving...

Last night, my old war buddy David S blew in from Phoenix, and I had his yacht ready for him, WITH TWO ELECTRIC HEATERS RUNNING TO WARM IT UP TO SURVIVAL TEMPERATURE! Yep, that's what we are facing here, and it is a microcosm of what the rest of the Northern Hemisphere faces this year...no summer (and you DIDN'T hear it here first if you have been following the TRUTH in climate change).

Nope, next weekend, I will dress in my formal yachting uniform, but I will have long johns and gore-tex under the Blue Blazer and White Duck pants as I sit on the flying bridge to anchor the fleet of Multnomah Channel Yacht Club past the review vessels. On the stern of "Lofoten Girl" will be the orange safety sign that indicates I am the rescue vessel for my yacht club, and not 45 minutes ago, I finished preparing my 50-meter floating tow-line, to be capable of taking a yacht up to 48 feet (our club's largest) in tow and returning it the twenty miles of windy Columbia, Willamette and little Multnomah Channel rivers to the yacht club if there is a propulsion failure. I'm better prepared for this duty than most, having a powerful twin-engine yacht and 8 years of experience in the Marine Patrol doing this work for a Marine Deputy's wages.

I just finished commissioning my new VHF-Marine  walkie-talkie, a Uniden  MHS350, and it checks out, along with the two fixed-installation VHFs aboard. I also just finished renewing ALL the ships' batteries ($$$$$!!!), and checked out the engines while moored in my berth, and they and their transmissions are ready for duty. I've de-winterized, so there better not be any more damn Arctic Outbreaks (the last one was last weekend!). The shore boat is on a temporary berth, the better to work the aft deck for any necessary rescue and towing work. As I write, the river rolls by my yacht at a bare 51 degrees, barely out of the winter-instant-death immersion temperature regime. Anyone falling overboard during the parade will have to be out of the river within 5 minutes, or rescue swimmers will be required to save lives. I have checked out my rescue throw bag/line and the three throwable livesaving devices I carry (only one is required, but I'll be damned to Hell if I'll be forced to choose who I throw my life ring to, so I have several).

I refuse to think about what this little 40-mile parade will cost me an my 1.7 mpg yacht at $4.00/gallon for fuel...but DAMN, I wish she was powered by steam and all I had to worry about was having enough cordwood aboard and the strong backs to muscle it down from the decks to the fire room...

Hype of the Year Award

Goes to the "online men's magazine FHM" which dares to tell me who the "sexiest woman of the year" is. What a complete load of crap. They present a list of skanks who couldn't spell "sensuous", let alone have any of that elusive quality.

Put it another way. If she is listed as the hottest of the hot, the men doing THAT rating would be impressed by an iceberg.

MY idea of hotties? I don't do the amount of research as he does, but Kim DuToit seems to have the category nailed on his blog.

Be very afraid...

The worst has happened. You, a CCW permitee who is carrying, are shopping in a store when an emotionally damaged person (EDP) enters with arms and the determination to take many people with him in his grand finale. He fires at you. You return fire.

You have engaged the shooter in a defensive gunfight, and by moving, correctly using cover and sparingly shooting, you have cornered the EDP in an area of the store away from the exits, and shoppers and employees have taken the opportunity to flee. Your role has switched from defensive to "hold your ground" tactics to keep the shooter bottled up so that he can't escape to do more damage outside.

The police finally get there, and entering the active shooter scene, see you first and take you under fire, hitting you. Your days are done. It matters not what happened to the EDP.

Sound extreme for a scenario? It's probably as close as it's going to get to what would actually happen.

What happened here?

The cops, responding to the active shooter scenario, are all business, and their adrenalin levels are ramped up. They see a gun in your hand and they fire. You died because you were concentrating on your armed enemy who was trying to kill you at the time, and you didn't see the officer first.

How did it come to this?

It came to this because of the "ninja" or "Tommy Tactical" mindset that  police are trained to these days.

As a cop first on the street in 1973, and retiring just as "Tommy Tactical" was taking hold here five years ago, I was taught that the use of deadly force REQUIRED first the evaluation of the scene THEN steps to make sure that the legitimate felon was the only one to be taken under fire, then finally verbal warnings ("FREEZE") before the trigger was pulled. The tactical situation depicted above was possible then, but had rarely occurred. SWAT call-outs in my entire city of 400,000 probably averaged 8 per year. There are now at least that many per month, and SWAT gets called out for perfectly ordinary felony warrant service (that one detective and one patrol officer, both armed with revolvers, used to do).

In the Tommy Tactical Age of policing, the deadly-force doctrine is much closer to the military doctrine (area denial fire, taking unseen enemy behind cover under fire, etc). Now the training emphasizes "see a gun, shoot the gunner". Voice commands to gun-armed persons are NOT given, under the theory that they only serve to give advantage to an armed enemy.

This change of doctrine from civilian/police to military/police tactics is going to cost a lot of lives, and especially at the point where citizens have to resort to firearms to defend themselves in urban settings. It's all un-necessary, and I can prove it.

One year in the mid-'70s, I reported with the rest of my shift for semi-annual firearms qualifications and training. We did the quals quickly, then several old-line detectives appeared and told us that we were going to assault a bunch of heavily armed bad guys holed up in a fortified building as a training scenario. We would be employing only our patrol revolvers, and LOTS of blanks were issued. The dicks had rifles with blanks and shotgun blanks also, in addition to their revolvers. The building was the old, boarded-up jail at Kelley Butte, right next to our range there. We had smoke grenades (or our Training Sgt did, he was leading us into "battle"). On the signal, about 8 of us moved out to envelop the building's perimeter, and we were immediately taken under fire from windows, the tower, everywhere in that building. We had to move forward, but we also had to remain concealed from the 4 dicks in the building, who were keeping notes on who they had "killed".

When it was all over, we learned:

• Lightly armed deputies are at a HUGE disadvantage assaulting barricaded felons in a building, but CAN carry the day, but MUST expect to take casualties doing so.
• The barricaded felons are going to die in the building, because even if they have decent cover, we had surrounded the building and they weren't getting out.

There was a thorough debrief afterwards, and we learned that half of us had been killed and almost everyone else wounded. I was listed as winged but not confirmed killed, which took two detectives to confirm. The detectives admitted that all of them would have either been killed or wounded due to the huge volume of aimed fire directed their way. In other words, we junior gunslingers achieved our goal of ending the days of a major gun-gang, but there would have been funerals and weeping wives and kids.

Weeping wives and kids are not allowed now. As I've railed at before in these pages, today's cops believe that by aggressive moves, such at shooting on sight of a firearm without warning, they can always go home to mama at the end of the day. In my book, that promise is NEVER made when you pin on the badge.

That "Tommy Tactical" philosophy needs to change. If I could wave my magic wand, cops would find their tactical ninja suits changed back to traditional police attire, and their training altered to determine who is an enemy and who isn't before opening fire.

The mere sight of a gun should never be cause to shoot a person, but read this little tidbit linked by David at "Of Arms and the Law", and you will see what I mean about today's ninja-cops.

Blogger's introspection

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LAST UPDATE: OK, I surrender! Any idea of hanging up my spurs is now shelved! You lurkers have me convinced! I apologize for thinking all of you were just after the Boobage. But that remembers me, I haven't published anything to Boobage in a while, have to remedy that little FUBAR.....

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UPDATE: 042308 2149 PDT: OK, I turned off Captcha....we'll see how much spam I get in comments. BTW, I'm IMPRESSED with the response so far...

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OK, soul-searching time.

I am asking myself who I am writing this blog for, and the answer comes back, myself. That's how it should be, since a journal is about recording what is happening around the journalist.

I get 700-800 reads on most days, but the vast majority of them are looking for the tit and ass in my "Boobs" section. I probably get 50-100 reads from people looking for my opinions and the facts I present along with them.

Even that's OK, because I get some feedback along with those reads.

Make that, USED TO get some feedback. I must have been asleep when a law was passed prohibiting commenting on Rivrdog posts, but the effect is there, my comments have fallen off to near zip.

I guess you could say that without the feedback of the comments, I have no way of knowing if I'm just whistling in the wind or how my opinions are received, and yes, I care how they are received.

So, I have decided to put myself and my blogging on probation for 30 days. If my writing brings an appropriate level of feedback, I'll continue, but if not, I'll announce a closing date, far enough in advance so that interested folks may peruse the blog and copy such items as they see fit, but at the end of THAT period, I will close my doors, ending this four-year experiment.

I have a typical writer's depression at having too little feedback. I had to give up on my novel because of legal (criminal) liability involved with the project as I was writing it (and I refuse to water it down with hyperbole so it wouldn't land me in jail as a terrorist), so I don't have that outlet for myself. I kept on with the blog, hoping to stimulate a few minds out there, but those minds are either gone or as stunted as mine.

If I close up shop, you haven't gotten rid of me. I will simply revert to reading blogs and commenting on them (which I find myself doing anyway, I'll just do more of it if my blog goes away). I might open a Facebook page also, but I'm going to take the money I save and treat myself to 40 extra miles of driving per month. See the country. Bucket list. All that.

Straight Talk Express has a flat tire

They had a GOP primary in PA yesterday, although it wasn't BREAKING NEWS like the (D)onk one was.

McCain, the presumptive nominee, got 73% of the delegates.

Stand by to ho-hum...

Ummm, isn't the "Straight Talk Express" supposed to be on a downhill roll now? The bus seems to have a flat tire.

The Right is NOT united behind McCain yet, and if the man thinks he can just Whistle Dixie and wait for the convention, he's wrong.

McCain needs to assure us that:

1. His days of tinkering with the Bill of Rights are done, finished, over with.
2. He needs to assure us that "Maverick" means he will take the lonely road of fighting for his Constitution as written instead of doing the popular thing and trying to "evolve" it.
3. As to the Second Amendment, he needs to tell us NOW what part of "shall not be infringed" he doesn't support. Is it that pesky part about including modern military rifles? The part that all the other politicos think is "interpretable"?  Maybe it's the part that I see that says I'm "well-regulated" as to my Militia capabilities if I am prepared to demonstrate them or comply with whatever manual of arms, TO&E or other preparatory guide I'm given?

I'm probably going to vote for the man, but right now my only motivation to do so is that he is the lesser of several evils. McCain needs to understand that there are a LOT of us who are saying this right now, and if we ALL changed our minds, there is no way he could win the election.

I'm watching McCain like a hawk, and am ready to get off his Straight Talk Express at the next stop if he doesn't begin to reassure me he will defend the Constitution and the culture. If I get off and others like me get off, he won't have enough fare-paying passengers to get that bus to the tire shop and get that flat fixed.