Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Slogan for sale, cheap

On this somber occasion of the 1,000 consecutive day of gasoline averaging $3.00 or more per gallon, an "Obama-versary" if there ever was one, your blogger created a new political slogan:

"Drill & Frack, bring cheap energy back!"

The slogan may be used with only a link to this blog as attribution.

Thursday Thuds, Burst-option selected on my unregistered Assault Thud Gun

Thud Subject One: Syria: Three-round burst selected:

• The US wants "teeth" in Putin's UN proposal to divest Assad's military of it's Chem weapons. Channeling Jack in "A few good men", "Teeth, you want teeth? You can't handle teeth".
• Note that Russia was the vendor for all these gas weapons, can fake up "1,000 tons" of them very easily. There is NO way to effectively inspect after the "hand-over". WE will have to trust Putin...and he has bridges for sale.
• Note that the US CIA has been giving "traceable" weapons, mostly AKs and LMGs, to the Free Syrian Army (but only the "good" militias"). Yeah, we really know how to do that "traceable" weapon thing. Just ask Eric Holder how that's done...

Thud Subject Two: Colorado anti-gun recall: Two round burst selected:

• Read the actual results. The recalls succeeded, but only because they were polling-place elections, had less than 20% turnout. Okay then, two GFW* pols are gone. The gun laws aren't, and the Kingfish, Gov. Hickenlooper, who signed the laws after hinting he'd veto them, wasn't touched. Phyrric Victory. Magpul's departure from CO is a much harder hit than this.
• Now we get to see how the NRA-ILA will use this "victory" to keep the save-the-2A ball rolling. My guess: a money solicitation is in the mail. Not being a member of NRA, I won't get one, but I'd bet on it happening. If the NRA would double-down now, and go after Hickenlooper, I might send some shekels their way, but I bet they don't go after the real prize.

Thud Subject Three: US Public Schools: Three-round burst selected:

• Just saw on Fox News this ayem that the idea of paying dropouts to come back to class is upon us again, like a bad 'Nam foot-rot that won't go away forty years later. Let's see, what do we REALLY accomplish with this idea: Nothing! These louts and loutesses who would come back for a $100 gift card will stay only until it's spent. While they are there, they will either sleep off their dope in class or worse, be disruptive to those who are there voluntarily to learn. Portland Public Schools tried this out up in the North End. It failed.
• Have you noted the drumfire of liberal writers in the liberal blatts trying to shoot down the No Child Left Behind testing? The harassing fire is getting louder. You will recall that this "program" was passed during the Bush Administration, when the (D)s had a lock on both houses of Congress. 
• NCLB is a Liberal-owned program, and even it's watered-down testing shows that schools are doing a worse and worse job on the kids all the time. The entire Liberal approach to education, that is, to just keep dumbing the lesson plans down until the dummies finally can "get" them, has failed.

Thud Subject Four: Obama masked bandit: Full-auto, empty the magazine!

• Check it out. Now stay tuned on this subject to see if this WHITE guy is charged with racial intimidation for wearing an Obama mask during a bank robbery. Get your bets down!

Thud Subject Five: Climate Hooey: Reload, fire another full-auto magazine:

• New study finds that out of 117 recent model-based climate studies, only three were "roughly accurate", and the other 114 "over-estimated the amount of warming" on the average, the over-estimations averaged on the order of double. That is not science, that is propaganda, and not very good propaganda at that.

That's it, readers. Your thud-gun recoil therapy for this week.

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* GFW (Gun Fearing Wuss), a term coined by the former gun-blogger and 2A-defender Kim duToit. 

 

Monday musings

Woke up VERY stiff and sore, but it's because of this:

Note the nice bark-rock borders of the ratty-ass lawn. There are hundreds of feet of those borders, the photo only shows a small portion of the yard. With a small start on the project Friday (we got maybe 40% done then), we banged out the rest of it yestiddy in four hours of grunt work with the little black truck as a motorized barrow, with hand barrows, shovels and rakes. Crew was the Olde Fharte (yours Truly), the #1 daughter and my young side-kick from next door. We moved 7.5 yards of that stuff, and spread it under bushes, etc all over the property.

That's a GOOD sore, comparable to coming back from the range and noticing the blue shoulder...

BTW, we got that job done just in time: the first Fall front rolled in off the Pacific yesterday, wet mostly WA, but it rained just west of me. All signs are for a month-early start to the Fall season. Have that from three sources: my own observation that the Eastern Pacific High has already retreated Southward to it's Winter position just 17 degrees north of the Equator, opening the door to winter weather off the Pacific; the local blueberry farmer who said two weeks ago that the seasons are all advancing by a month, and the Cottage Grove Weather Witch*, who has noted all the usual change-of-season flora and fauna arriving a month early. All these sources agree, so the NOAA Warming Wallahs who predict a long, hot, summer-into-Fall are out to lunch this year. With the FROPA (frontal passage) yesterday, the Weather Discussion from NOAA remarked, "the models didn't handle this well", meaning to ordinary folk that Ma Nature threw a curve ball when NOAA's computers were expecting a fastball. The Farmer's Almanac, which is as reliable as any forecaster and better than some (uses sun data, like the accurate Russian long-range forecasting), says we will have a long, brutal winter. BTW, up in AK, the first Siberian front and arctic air mass crossed the Bering Strait into AK three days ago, ending AK's growing season with a blast of below-freezing temps.

Some of the smarter climatologists say that despite the bleatings of AlGore & Company, we are about to enter a Cold Period, and that it will be comparable to the one which peaked in 1950. The cold period has probably already begun, but it will slam us hard in two years. Wonder how all that "Climate Change" rhetoric will fit into the 2016 election cycle, hmmmm?

Speaking of Al Gore, who owns one of the biggest "Carbon Credit" trading banks, isn't it a bit of a conflict of interest for the guy to use his bank's money to promote Marxist revolution against energy availability while sucking up the bucks he makes trading the "Carbon Credits", which increase in value with every anti-energy act he funds? If we had a REAL Securities and Exchange Commission, they would be looking into that.

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* Cottage Grove Weather Witch: aka the Rivrsis.

The GMO "war" is genocide

The Left's most ardent "grass roots" movement, now that they have their grass, seems to be the fight against GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms. In that group must go ALL the food grains and ALL the farm-raised animal protein, both livestock and fish.

Here's a clue for the Left, and their hippoids (combination of a hippie and a hemorrhoid) who are advocating to remove GMOs from the world's food supply:

There won't BE any food supply without GMOs.

That means famine. Planned famine is genocide. You anti-GMO whackos are advocating for genocide, same as if you advocate for tribal warfare in Central Africa, or Jewish Pogroms in the Middle East.

You people need to lower your anti-GMO banner NOW.

I'm not so sure that GMO isn't a Socialist stalking horse. The anti-GMO fanatics seem to want to make an apples-and-oranges argument by slipping into their GMO screed something about evil profit-making in agribusiness. Is this their REAL motive? Removing GMO seed grain or veterinary medicines to help livestock and farmed fish thrive doesn't seem acceptable on ANY level, so will they then just fall back to their pre-planned position and demand socialization of all agriculture?

Here's the Rivrdog position: Do you want all GMO food labeled as such? Easy. Just put a sign on the front doors of all grocery stores, "All food sold here is GMO, unless otherwise labeled" That accomplishes this boneheaded movement's goal, doesn't it? Even if you go into the most expensive vegan hippie food boutique, you will find they sell, at outrageous prices, almost all-GMO food, because there has been NO non-GMO seed produced for at least a century, save for a few small test plots that are hand-cultivated. Even if food is "organically-grown", it is still GMO because of the genetically-modified seed it was grown from. "Organic" does not mean "non-GMO".

The only food grains that are non-GMO are such grains that grow without cultivation in the wildland, such as millet or wild rice. Good luck on gathering enough of that to make into food for more than a handful of people. The Native Americans couldn't do it very successfully, and their population was ALWAYS limited by famine and starvation (until the white people limited it forever by disease and bullets).

Nope, the anti-GMO Movement (google that) is a Socialist farce, like the war on fossil fuel, which is in plentiful supply, but cheap energy promotes capitalism, and the Socialists can't have that, can they?

The Country Gal

...on Science and Technology.

Country Gal is fairly well the Renaissance Woman. She's policed the mean streets with the toughest male cops, taking down the meanest criminals. With her new laser-sculpted eyeballs, she can now outshoot me with pistols. She was a schoolmarm, too, before she was a cop. I'm honored to call her my Friend.

She believes in her Continuing Education, and so she sent me this link to a Japanese inventor who has solved two of the most vexing problems modern Man faces: energy production and waste removal.

This scientist has invented simple equipment that turns waste plastics back into oil.

My question: With millions of metric tons of plastic trash around the world to re-convert, why haven't those oh-so-green politicians demanded that this equipment be imediately put to use to clean up the planet? Those  green-fingered light heads light-fingered greenheads need to realize that the "carbon footprint" of plastic is reduced by 80% when it is recycled this way.

Why can't the "Green" world be held to their own dictat, all the time?

 

NOAA duplicity

How stupid does NOAA think we are? My daily blatt carries this front-page story about melting icecaps and rising seas. Okaaay, then. Whoopee farge. Now, I seem to recall reading an article last week which states that on the Winter side of the planet, ice is accumulating on the Antarctic Ice shield at a record pace. Did NOAA somehow NOT know this? Why are we being force-fed the warm side, and not having it balanced by reports from the cold side of things? It IS, after all, a ROUND planet with two hemispheres of equal importance, or did NOAA somehow forget this?

I don't think that they forgot it, I think that they have an agenda to sell, and record accumulation of ice in the Southern Hemisphere doesn't float their boat sell much soap, so they ignore it. Look, we all know that we are in a warming cycle from the last Ice Age, so things will heat up, the seas will rise, and ice will melt. That's a natural cycle which has existed on this planet since it became temperate at least a billion years ago. It's not news, it's ancient history.

Once again, I challenge these emo people leftists to tell me why, if WE'RE ALL GONNA DROWN, OMG!, why the HELL no money is being spent on engineering studies, or any other type of planning to move coastal populations to higher ground. Really, this vital planning is NOT happening. Money IS being assessed and raised, via "carbon taxes", but ALL of that dough goes to fatten up the socialist governments that levied the taxes, and none is being put to work to solve the upstream physics problems.

Shout this from the rooftops: WHERE ARE THE CIVIL ENGINEERS?

Nota Bene*: (Important note, for those of you without a classical educateshum). Read this article in Net Right Daily. Puts the lie to the oft-claimed "climate change is getting worse" screed of the Left.

* It's Latin. In Latin the gender, case and conjunction of words are important. For example, "bene" would be conjugated "benny, biddy, bitch"....(Ivory Tower humor there, I'm sorry)(no, I'm not!)

Marxism and cheap energy - Updated!

...are direct enemies, in case you just arrived from another galaxy and need to catch up.

A standing corollary, a "razor", even, to the above is that the environmental protection movement was co-opted by the marxists long ago.

Initially, the enviros contented themselves with the stealth support of marxism, pulling off various stunts such as forest sit-ins and the like. Most of those tactics had some real environmental protection element in them, and were only related to the marxist-revolutionary game by their concomitant destruction of standing capitalist economies, such as in the forest products industry.

The enviro movement's work didn't satisfy the marxists though, because the results were not evident as marxism.

The marxists decided, about two years ago, to be much more direct, so they picked the ONE element of the global capitalist economy that can least stand interference, and they have declared war on it. That element is cheap and relatively-unlimited energy production.

Energy comes primarily from fossil fuels, and likely will for the foreseeable future. Thanks to huge technological leaps in the science of locating fossil fuels and recovering them, there is more fossil fuel available to the capitalist marketplace than ever before, so much so that it has driven the price of one such fuel, natural gas, down by a third. Such increases in cheap energy have stimulated the global economy like never before, and despite the bungled political attempts to regulate it, the global economy is doing quite well because of cheap energy.

So, now the marxist elements want to stop the cheap energy by limiting the supply of it with direct action. Most of the fossil fuels must be transported long distances from source to use, and the transportation networks are vulnerable to sabotage (still not ruled out in the horrible oil-train disaster in Quebec Province, Canada). If not direct sabotage, then we get public protest aimed at stopping or severely limiting fuels transportation.

Oregon's Columbia River is one such transportation network. Along it's shores run two major railroads, the BNSF and the Union Pacific, both modern, well-maintained and capable of significant increases in rail traffic, and in the river itself, large barge-pushes can out-do even the legendary efficiency of the steel wheel on a steel rail for getting large tonnage from Point A to Point B. Coal transport by rail and barge from Wyoming mines to Pacific Coast destinations has been proposed, but is being actively opposed, and now unit-train transport of crude oil from the Baaken Formation in Canada/North Dakota is underway, but no facility exists yet to transship the contents of the tank trains into tanker ships on the Pacific Coast. One such terminal is proposed, and it's getting vigorously opposed already, only days after the proposal for the Port of Vancouver, WA to put up a transhipment terminal.

This past weekend, an enviro goup no one heard much from before sprang up and put on a large, well-organized demonstration along, over and in the Columbia River. Their tired, shopworn slogan is "none shall pass", which sounds quite like a revolutionary call to arms, don't you think? Think again, envirowhackos, it was first used by the French on their vaunted Maginot Line, and we all know how THAT turned out, eh? The protest group took over a large park, the Vancouver Amphitheater, on the WA side of the River, then they took to the Interstate Bridge which carries I-5 over the River, and about 100-150 small paddle-craft took to the River itself, blocking the channel for a while. The authorities (US Coast Guard, and the Marine Patrols of Clark (WA) and Multnomah (OR) Counties stood by, but apparently took no enforcement action. Enviro photogs have published their own photos for the media, so I pass these on for your use to send to your CongressCritters and ask them why such illegal behavior is being tolerated.

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UPDATE: 072913 1143 PDT: It appears that Al Gore may have had something to do with this event. Remember, Al Gore is the famous leftie who pretends to be all for fixing the Climate while his lifestyle helps to pollute it worse.

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If you communicate with your CongressCritters, or your local Government reps, you may point out that the following Federal violations apparently occurred and are now well-documented:

• Blocking the navigation Channel by watercraft.
• Conducting a water parade without a USCG permit
• Blocking a Navigation channel by rapelling from an overwater structure

In addition, the act of hanging off the bridge violates Oregon traffic law.

There are NO reports in the media of any enforcement actions taken during this demonstration. The Federal violations, when acted on by the Coast Guard, could have been written up on a USCG Form 4100, and civil fines of up to $5,000 levied for each person and each violation cited.

Government authority exists to end this marxist war on energy, and end it NOW. Our First Amendment protects the rights of citizens to protest, but it DOES NOT EXCUSE their violations of the law. If we let the bringers of this little marxist/enviromentalist war on capitalism gain a bridgehead, it will be VERY hard to stop at a later date. This little brush-fire war needs to be stomped out, NOW.

Maybe a Naval Militia needs to be raised to keep the navigation on the River open....

The Left makes War

As in:

"War on Coal", their fight against the cheapest form of energy, because the Left wants to use high energy prices to force compliance with all things Lefty.

"War on GMO"  (genetically modified organisms) This is a real war, with field agents of the Left out destroying crops in the field, thereby generating higher prices for food. More expensive food leads to government interfering in it's production, and more Power to the Left.

Used to be, the Left was a bit more coy about declaring these "wars", because, well, Lefties aren't supposed to be war-like, are they? They are supposed to be anti-war, aren't they? Maybe they have learned that when they bring a plowshare to a battlefield, some officer is going to kick their ass and tell then to come back with a rifle instead, that we're fightin' not farmin' here.

So, maybe it's just that they fight for their beliefs, and now we get real war with the Left, not just the hyperbole-war that they've brought before now.

Okayyyy, then, that leads to the One Big Question, as Joe would put it:

When do we get to start shooting back at them? It is the natural right of any person or group to enter war when they are attacked first.

We have the right to defend ourselves from the Left's wars.

I want to fight back. Where do I sign up? 

More Global Warming alarmism

Part Deux? Soixante Deux (62) is more like it. 

Here is some totally garbage alarmism from Ass Press.

Here is the opening statement:

"TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) — The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels."

Okay then, let's apply a tiny filter called Truth to this.

• Nowhere in the entire story does it ever say how much the sea level has risen.
• It does say that the Grenadans have done some ill-advised dredging in the area.
• Nowhere does it say that their man-on-the-scene has ANY credentials as either an engineer or a climate scientist, but...
• The article goes on to blame climate change anyway.
• The simple fact here is that there are two ways to flood a coastline: raise the sea level or lower the seashore. It definitely appears that the latter was done here, but yet the alarmism still continues.

This whole Ass Press article is a crock of crap.

I challenge the Global Warming Alarmist Fraternity to adopt the following manifesto of Truth:

• Every article on the subject of rising sea level damage shall be opened with a statement of just how high the sea level has risen, over a stated period of time. Not in storm surges, but permanent sea level rise, the ONLY indicator that can (or can't) show the truth of such claims. 
• When talking about sea level changes, ANY alteration to local ocean floors MUST be discussed, with an engineering-level statement of how those changes, natural OR man-made, affected flooding of the coastline.
• Water seeks a constant level, and is easy to measure. We know about tides, we can predict and measure storm surges, and all of those factors can be discounted to give us a true base water level. According to this interactive chart by NOAA, the sea level rise in Grenada's part of the Caribbean Sea is from 3 to 6 millimeters per century. The entire US East coast has a sea level rise of 3 millimeters per century, maximum. That's one-eighth of an inch, and one quarter of an inch, MAXIMUM,  in the South Caribbean Sea. Note that in AK, some sea levels are trending DOWN by a half-to 3/8" per year.

This alarmist article by Ass Press does no one any good.

Have you ever asked yourself just why, if all the Earth's coastlines are in danger of inundation from rising sea levels, that engineering to "save the coastline" hasn't even started yet, anywhere? Can you guess why that is?

In every engineering analysis of solutions to a potential crisis, the engineers will first ask the question, "is this crisis actually happenning or can it realisticically be expected to happen, and when?"

Of course there's no engineering, because that question has already been asked, and the answer is, always, "come back to the engineers when you have data showing an actual threat".

That's the name of THAT tune, "Actual Threat". As currently measured, the actual threat, if present trends continue, will not occur for several to many centuries.

BTW, the Ass Press article tries to blame "ferocious storm surges made worse by climate change". That's an apples and oranges discussion, and again, the alarmists will lose, because when you stack up hurricanes by the century or epoch, there's little to no change to report. Weather is weather and climate is climate, and there are few links between them.

Ass Press, get real or get out of here.

End of discussion.

 

 

What a racket!

Computer printers are a racket.

Several years ago, the Canon all-in-one printer I had, a Pixma 1500, started telling me that the "ink waste tank is full", and, of course, it stopped working. After reading up about it, I decided just to toss the printer and get a new one. Ka-ching! My Citeh charges a $5 fee to "recycle" such equipment.

Got the new one, a Lexmark S305 which the reviews said was a good basic printer. About $50 for the printer, but it takes somewhat spendy ink cartridges (the real reason they dump these printers on the market so cheap is to keep you buying ink). Now, after two years, the Lexmark is toast. It keeps throwing me a code which says "printhead error". Following the troubleshooter, I cleaned the printhead, but that did not fix the problem. The problem happened with no warning, which is not the failure mode of a wearing-out part on any machine. I suspect that the machine was programmed to fail after x-number of copies, but I can't afford the hi-tech private forensics to prove that. I could plunk down $95 and get a replacement printhead, but if the machine is programmed in failure mode, that won't work and I would have wasted the money.

So, I went to Fry's.com and got another sexy Lexy for $39.99. Add $20 bucks for shipping (costs about $15 gas to drive to Fry's in Wilsonville, and five bucks more for no freeway aggravation is worth it). 

There's no way out of this forced-obsolescence racket.

If I could, I'd go back to my old Panasonic dot-matrix printer, which in High Quality mode, printed black-ink copies just fine. I just got tired of putting on ear protection each time I had to use it and tearing off the tractor-ends from the paper.