September 2005 Archives

Fester's Place has done sort of a counter to my analysis that Al Queda has been kicked pretty hard in the nuts lately.

The thing I think he's missing is that the estimates I see of insurgency size from the Brooking's report are obviously completely made up. So doing any sort of analysis of the difference between a hard number like the number of insurgents reported “detained or killed” and the insurgency size is pretty meaningless. For that matter, I think the estimates of the number of insurgents “detained or killed” is too soft as well, because I doubt that 100% of all those those numbers are guilty.

That's the problem with “enemy body count” numbers, which is why I avoid those portions of the Brookings report.

The other issue is that the numbers have no way to reflect commitment to the “cause”. If we keep hitting the leadership as we've been doing, eventually the only people left will be as effective as well, the Howard Dean Presidential campaign...

So if the insurgency had a million members, but didn't hurt anybody and just were members of the “Saddam Hussien for President” party, that wouldn't bother me; that's probably even a win condition for the US.

Ever notice how every couple of years they try to invent some new kind of magic fat that somehow its ok to eat? Or the reverse in this case, that somehow Lays Potato Chips are ok, because they don't have any Trans Fat?

One of the reasons Weight Watchers worked so well for me is all that nonsense went away. You get a point for every 50 calories, so its like shopping: you can eat those Super Size French Fries for 16 points, or you can just have a cheeseburger for 12 points.

Surprised as I was to find out the French Fries were more then the cheeseburger, it was easy to give them up. They tasted good, but they weren't that much of a bargain...

Your shopping instinct meets dieting. Genius!

It's important to realize that our soldiers plan, execute, then attack. It's hard to see that with the day to day reports, so Bill Roggio and a couple of others have a Flash presentation showing our military's actions over the 20 days

The amazing thing to me is how effective they've been yet with very few KIAs on our side.

If I had one criticism of this presentation, it would be that it doesn't show the Haditha operation from the beginning of August. I think that would demonstrate more of the long term plan.

It's roundup time!

Here's an article talking about Shale oil. I've pointed out before that there is more oil in shale then anything else, its just been more expensive to extract it. The interesting thing about the new in-situ methods is that they could pay off at $30/barrel.

That's why development stopped before in the 70's, because at $15/barrel, it didn't make any sense. But I could envision a future where the US is one of the worlds largest suppliers of oil, and only Europe is dependent on Arab oil.

Think about that for a minute.

An article ragging on the Dell competitor to the Shuffle, which looks even more lame now that the iPod Nano is out. Read it here

Technorati Tags: ipod

At the end of a long, perfectly correct rant about the MSM coverage of Iraq was this tidbit:

I have had my staff aggressively pursue media coverage for all sorts of events that tell the other side of the story only to have them turned down or ignored by the press in Baghdad. Strangely, I found it much easier to lure the Arab media to a “non-lethal” event than the western outlets. Open a renovated school or a youth center and I could always count on Al-Iraqia or even Al-Jazeera to show up, but no western media ever showed up - ever.

It's pretty weird that the Arab media was more willing to show our good side then our own media...

He's got this good essay about the terrorists personnel problems with lots of quotes and links that underline what I've been saying lately about the insurgents becoming much less effective over the last few months. You can read it here.

Here's my favorite bit, because it quotes a statistic I been looking for and haven't been able to find:

The number of vehicle-borne improvised explosive device [VBIED] attacks in Iraq has declined dramatically in recent months. According to a source familar with the totals, there were rougly 125 VBIED attacks in Iraq in May; by August, that number had declined to 68. Another stat you won’t find in The New York Times: since the Iraq War began, at least 25% of all VBEIDs have been found and cleared before they detonated. That translates into hundreds—perhaps thousands—of lives saved.

With the decrease in VBIED attacks, there has been a corresponding increase in attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). But (again) you won’t hear the reason for that shift in tactics. Using IEDs allows the jihadists to conserve strained personnel resources. Apparently, there are fewer suicide bombers willing to die for the cause, and fewer fighters available for direct attacks against coalition forces, prompting a shift to less risky IED attacks, which require fewer personnel.

So car bombs have been declining. I'd noticed that, but I hadn't considered the fat that VBIEDs are also suicide bombers. It's good to know the insurgents have a finite supply of complete idiots. Though come to think of it, I remember reading about how they used this one retarded guy as a suicide bomber. Or the guy they told to deliver the truck to such and such place, only to blow it up while he was inside it.

Someone asked a soldier in Iraq:

Do you think that what you are doing is worth the deaths of 25,000 Iraqis and 2,000 US soldiers, or, is this going to be like Vietnam - a completely pointless exercise? The reason I ask is that it seems that we are helping to install an Islamic government with strong ties to Iran, which will lead to the enslavement of women. Must make you wonder what you are fighting for!

He responded

Go read his answer, its interesting. I liked this bit:

Islam is a fact of life here. Moreover, Islam is a way of life. Islam is inextricably intertwined in the day to heppenings of the average citizen. When a religion carries so much precendence in a society, aspects and beliefs of the religion are bound to manifest themselves in law and government. Shari'a law is what these people have known for generations.

If Shari'a law is incorporated into the constitution, and the constitution is ratified by popular vote, then we have done our jobs. We have given them the opportunity to freely elect their leaders, and on 15 October, they will have to ability to adopt or discard the laws the leaders have created. Wether or not the constitution contains elements of Shari'a law is the choice of the people.

I don't see enslavement of women here.

Insurgents is anyone who attacks him, while terrorists are anyone who attacks civilians. From Phil and Becky's Blog:

I don't necessarily harbor any personal angst against insurgents. I don't take it personally if they want to attack soldiers. Terrorists, on the other hand, I have a problem with. Terrorists are cowards who kill innocent, defenseless civilians because they are too spineless to attack us. There is nothing honorable about preying upon the weak.

At first I was going to quibble, because often they are the same guys. But Phil is a soldier in Iraq, so he probably knows about a million times more about Iraq at this point then I do...

I think its interesting that politicians and the media can't decide where the line is, but a soldier has no problem.

Cow-Borne-Improvised-Explosive-Device

Wow, the power to destroy bureaucrats. Wish I had that power.

Katrina: The Gathering

You'll only get it if you play the card game Magic.

Hat Tip: Miserable Donuts

I'd forgotten, but Terrorism Unveiled reminded me.

Cool!

“There was a time not long ago when Al-Qaeda might have been analyzed or interpreted as a manifestation of Arab discontent, a violent quest for political reform or an aggressive statement against American or Zionist domination. But the most recent operations called for by Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ought to finally disprove such theories. His declaration of war against Iraqi Shiites illustrates that Al-Qaeda has lost any and every possible claim it may have had to moral, noble or rational objectives. In declaring war against Iraqi Shiites, Al-Qaeda has proven itself to be nothing more than a ruthless, sectarian gang. It is not unlike many other sectarian militias that we have seen in the region; the only difference is that it is much more vicious and has a much wider reach.” - The Daily Star, Lebanon (15 Sept 2005)

Hat Tip: Security Watchtower

Check out the Fourth Rail and keep scrolling.

Also, Security Watchtower has a cool map which I found via the Fourth Rail.

As always, reviewing the data from the Brookings Institution. I made the above graph to demonstrate some of the things I've been talking about in previous reports. (Note that “Car Crashes above is really 'non-hostile' deaths. About 90% of those are car crashes, so I named it that to put it in perspective.)

Now remember on that last month this is only through September 14th, still, that's halfway through the month.

1. IEDs have been between 30-40 deaths/month for most of the year.

2. Deaths from ”bullets“ (called other Hostile Fire in the Brookings report) have peaks when the military conducts operations.

So here's what I see: Everything but IED deaths and Bullet deaths have been trending down since May. This directly correlates with the soldiers reports that things have been settling down in Iraq. The bullet deaths are trending upwards, but that reflects the soldiers being more aggressive. IEDs have a slight trend upwards, but that also reflects that the insurgents have become much weaker. About the only thing they can do now is skulk around at night and plant bombs, they're too weak to mount much of a direct effort against the troops.

Now look at that last month, September. Its too early to say for sure given that we're halfway through the month, but look at the steep decline. Most of the numbers are zero! This almost seemed too good to be true, so I double checked on the Centcom site. Very few casualty reports.

Now of course, in the news we're reading about Al Queda killing all these innocent civilians, so it doesn't seem like Al Queda is ”losing“. But the reality is that Al Queda is flailing about. These last few attacks are doing nothing more then inflaming the populace against them. Attacking day laborers? Even fellow Sunnis thought that was beyond the pale, aiming at the poorest members of Iraq. There's going to be be a huge amount of blowback for Al Queda for that.

Here's the other interesting bit: There have been no US servicemen killed so far due to Tal Afar. That's partially because the Iraqis were leading the action on that one. No deaths and relatively few injuries means that Al Queda was exceptionally weak there; even the Iraqi military deaths are low so far this month for conducting such a big operation. As a result of that operation, 22 weapons caches have been found, which means fewer deaths going forward.

So I think these bombings may be one of Al Queda's last gasps. These attacks were ill-concieved, ill-planned and will have exactly the opposite effect. Much like the car bombing that purposefully killed children a couple of months ago, the populace is getting sick of these idiots and their tired philosophy of hate. One of the problems with suicide bombers from a military perspective is that they're like a gun with only one bullet. Even then, not all of these bombings are created equal: the bombs that have been going off have been less sophisticated and therefore less effective. The main reason the casualty count was so high with the first set of bombings was because that one guy killed so many day laborers.

Pretty cool, the Tampa Tribune has started interviewing soldiers:

Article 1

Article 2

Hat Tip: Instapundit not like he needs the traffic...

From this press conference:

Q     Sir, this is Tony Capaccio with Bloomberg News.  We met back in November when I was up there.  I have an equipment question. Not only are you fighting the insurgents, but you're the highlight unit for the Stryker, that's gotten mixed publicity.  We were told by The Washington Post earlier this year that it could be unsafe for soldiers to ride in.  Give me the unvarnished assessment of how well the vehicle has performed and what are some of the weaknesses that need to be corrected.    

            COL. BROWN:  Yeah, Tony, I'm glad you brought that up, because I'll tell you, nothing makes our soldiers madder than criticism of the Stryker.  That report, I think, was absolutely ridiculous.  The Post -- I'll be honest with you.  They had a reporter up here and he wanted to provide input.  I said, “Go talk to any soldiers you want.  Go ask any soldier which vehicle they would prefer to ride in; they would choose a Stryker, I guarantee it.”  And they never asked them.  They published the report based on a lessons learned report of how you could improve the vehicle.  Well, of course, we try to improve every vehicle we have.  No vehicle's perfect.   

            The Stryker's fantastic.  It has incredible mobility, incredible speed.  It has saved hundreds of my soldiers' lives.  I'm telling you hundreds of their lives.  We've been hit by 84 suicide VBIEDs have hit Strykers, and I've had the greater majority of soldiers walk away without even a scratch.  It's absolutely amazing.  If I were in any other type vehicle, I would've had huge problems. 

Later:

I will tell you, interestingly enough, that same Washington Post reporter, after that report came out, he came to me and he said, please, Colonel Brown, do not make me ride in a Humvee.  He said please, let me ride in a Stryker.  And I was too nice a guy.  I should have made him ride in a Humvee.  I let him ride in a Stryker. 

Here is someone who really knows about oil discussing oil production, etc.

It's a WMV File

However, this illustrates my point from before, that the additional capacity from Saudi Arabia is heavy sour crude so its less attractive to most refiners other then Valero, which is using that as a corporate strategy.

That doesn't mean oil production has permanently peaked, as the very low oil prices for decades meant exploration, coal liquification, tar sands, etc. weren't worth doing. It's never been that we'll run out of oil, but rather that we'll run out of cheap oil.

Platts has a good discussion of this here though you'll have to register to read the whole article. Tip: You have to click the headers at the top of the article if you want to read the whole thing.

Ever wondered:

So what is “Light, Sweet, Crude” anyways?

Is there “Heavy, Sour, Crude”?

I've been learning about oil prices courtesy of my job. You can find out some of the details by reading between the lines from the data on this page but is basically boils down to this.

The oil prices you see on television are for Light, Sweet, Crude as priced on NYMEX. In America, that's called the WTI price, for “West Texas Intermediate”.

That price actually has very little to do with any actual gasoline production, rather that's sort of the benchmark everyone uses.

So the benchmark starts with light (meaning the crude oil doesn't need as much refining), sweet (meaning the oil doesn't have a lot of sulfur) crude oil delivered to the oil pipeline in West Texas.

That actually is only obliquely related to the price of gasoline. The first question an oil refiner asks himself is “where am I located?”. Depending on where the refiner is located, that WTI price quoted on television is going to be higher or lower then what the refiner actually pays. For instance, on the West Coast, a refiner might pay $2.75 less per barrel.

The next question for the refiner is “Where did this oil actually come from and what does its chemistry look like?” That “light, sweet crude delivered to West Texas” is really only a theoretical barrel of oil. That barrel of oil is actually a sort of mixture of all the oil in the world as defined by this company called “Platts”. You can read the details here. The reality is that depending on where the oil comes from, the refiner will have to adjust their process. Heavy oil takes more work to refine into gasoline, but it also produces more products. Sour oil takes even more work because you have to remove the sulfur. Platts has this converter where you can convert a barrel of oil from any oil field in the world to the equivalent barrel of oil from another field here. So for instance, 1 barrel of oil from the sea off Qatar is only worth 97% of a barrel of WTI.

Now Gasoline is only about 50% oil, the rest is additives like MTBE, ethanol, etc. which have their own prices.

You can get a taste for the refining process here and you can see all the different prices that go into a gallon of gas here.

Here's the interesting bit about how oil prices relate to gas prices. That WTI theoretical barrel is actually the maximum the refiner would pay for oil. Currently, Valero (the company I got most of this information from) is paying between $5.25 and $17.25 less per barrel then the WTI price. That means that they are paying 8-25% less then the price you see on TV. This is pretty consistent on a percentage basis, in the first quarter of 2003, they were getting about the same discount for using sour crude vs. sweet crude. Year to year though, the sour crude discount has been increasing. Charts from Valero So if oil goes up $1, the actual oil going into your gasoline might only go up $0.75.

Even more interesting, the proportion of sour-heavy to sweet-light oil has been increasing. That is, more and more of the oil is sour, heavy oil. Since some refineries can only use sweet light oil, the discount is going to keep getting bigger. Which means the benchmark is becoming less and less relevant...

Bottom line: Oil prices have a very vague relationship to gas prices and they're going to get even more so unless platts changes the benchmark. Which I suspect they might do, given this editorial from their site.

What that all means? I don't know, but it was interesting.

From the Guardian of all places.

The article basically argues that the welfare state has made things worse for the poor, especially blacks.

This all goes along with the idea of thinking that people who don't believe what you believe are evil or stupid that I talked about yesterday. I too believe that its in the best interest of all of us to give the poor a hand up, but I also believe the worst possible thing we can do is give the poor a hand out. Currently, my wife and I have basically adopted a homeless family and are attempting to do just that.

My wife had an interesting conversation with a black woman she worked with who came out of the inner city. It seems that prior to some of the welfare reforms, black men would specifically evaluate women by how well they could fill out the government forms. There was this whole subindustry in her area where you could go to certain women and they would help you fill out forms for this grant or that grant in return for a percentage.

The mind boggles. Generations of people trained in how to live off of the government teat.

Some of my hippie friends ask me how I could ever vote Republican, and I always ask them if they actually know any poor people. Few of them do.

The government programs we have to “help” the poor don't help people not be poor. If they did, there would be more education grants, college tuition would be tax deductible, etc. If anything, our social programs are self perpetuating.

Someone said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Bush gets mocked by the left for supporting “faith-based initiatives” but I've noticed that all of the religion-based aid organizations in town are very much geared toward helping people help themselves. They end up being much more effective, with fewer repeat customers. Somedays I think we should take the entire social portion of the federal budget and translate it into a mandatory personal charity donation by each citizen.

I think that the average citizen would do a better job picking social programs to donate money to then the government has done. In 10 years, the social portion of the federal budget would probably be a quarter of what it is now, because we'd be spending the money 10 times more effectively.

Hat Tip: My Own Thoughts

I work in the finance industry, which basically means I can't talk about how cool my company is or the SEC would knock at my door...

But it means I'm a bit of a finance geek, so this posting over at Marginal Revolution saying that Enron and WorldCom may have cost this country about 600,000 jobs is pretty interesting.

So I got a copy of the local art rag I write for occasionally this Saturday. The piece called Parking Lot Wars was actually written for them, but I got bumped due to lack of space because they had a long tribute article to a friend of theirs who committed suicide.

I read a few pages of the Noise and started seeing red. There was this long article about questioning the “official” 9/11 story. (Their quotes not mine.)

9/11 was one of the most heavily documented events in human history, and people still want to believe something other then the evidence of their own eyes. It's just amazing. In March of 2005, Popular Mechanics of all people had to run an article debunking all the 9/11 myths. Read it here

It was just infuriating. Frankly, I was ready to quit writing for the Noise, I didn't want to be associated with that kind of crap, in the same way that I wouldn't want to write for a paper that took Holocaust deniers seriously.

A commenter wrote in reference to Bush:

How can someone claim to be so religious and then at the same time support assault weapons! Hypocracy in it's finest

You know, I have yet to meet someone in favor of banning assault weapons who actually knows what meets the definition of an assault weapon.

First off, “assault weapon” doesn't not mean “machine gun”. Fully automatic weapons have been illegal since 1920. Those are not “assault weapons”. So block that from your mind. Assault weapons have nothing to do with machine guns.

For a weapon to be an assault weapon, it has to have two things:

• A bayonet mount
• A large magazine capacity like say 30 rounds

Now I ask you. A bayonet is basically a knife you can stick on the end of your gun so that if you run out of bullets, you can use your gun as a really cumbersome spear. As far as the bayonet goes, are you really worried about people being knifed with guns? Probably not right? I'm sure someone has statistics on it somewhere “number of people stabbed by a gun every year” but you'd have to guess its a really low number. Like maybe one person a decade. Who probably put a knife on their gun, then tripped and fell on it. So banning bayonet mounts seems kind of dumb. What exactly is a bayonet mount anyways? I mean 3 pieces of duct tape would do the job. Are we going to ban duct tape?

So now we're down to the large magazine. Now I really don't get it to be honest. If you didn't hit anything with the first 10 bullets, having 20 extra probably isn't going to help you any. I guess at that point, the bayonet mount makes a lot of sense. But we're talking about banning weapons based on this, so I'll have to turn that around. Would you really be more scared of someone with 30 bullets in his gun then someone with 10? Is someone with a BB gun more scary then someone with a rifle? BB guns hold 100 BBs does that make them more dangerous then a single shot zip gun?

So basically, the only thing scary about assault weapons is their name. Yet our commenter above thinks that because Bush believes in God, he should therefore want to ban assault weapons.

Here's what I think. The assault weapon ban is a bad law. Its a bad law because it doesn't really know what its supposed to be banning. Some guns are “assault weapons” some aren't and they look almost identical. If I duct tape a butter knife to my BB gun does it make it an assault weapon? Probably.

So I'm against the ban, because I'm against laws that don't make sense. Not only am I against the ban, but I'm against anyone who is for the ban, because that means they aren't a serious enough person to look beyond the name “assault weapon”. There's a reason the right to bear arms is the 2nd amendment right after freedom of speech; because the founding fathers thought it was that important. So if you're going to mess with the 2nd most fundamental right we have, you want to tread carefully with eyes wide open. The assault weapons ban tromps forward with eyes blindfolded.

So I don't know about Bush, but I believe in God, and I don't believe in banning assault weapons even though I've never met God and don't own an assault weapon.

Good article by a good thinker, James Dunnigan here.

Hat Tip: Austin Bay

Bush is, in my estimation, adequate as President, but not much more. I've thought that all along -- which is why you've never seen the kind of lyrical praise of Bush here that once appeared at Andrew Sullivan's place, or the kind of disappointment with Bush you see at Sullivan's place now. But in a world of goofy-looking yet pompous empty suits, the adequate man is . . . President. And the Democrats made sure that this was the choice we had in 2004.

Yep.

Great Photo Essay by an amateur. See it here

Clearly shows it wasn't the hurricane, it was the flooding.

Personally, I would have called the essay Why Cowboys Kick Ass and all you Liberals are Whiny Greenhorns but he works in Hollywood, where every movie has to have a single word title...

So my wife comes into my office and says “my bruises from paintball have healed. That means its time to go again!”

This is my weekly review of the report available here. It's a report compiled by the Brookings institute every week that attempts to try to see how things are going in Iraq. During the month I can just guess what the trend will be like, at the end of the month I can nail it down. I also read the weekly report from the State Department, but that's not usually as good.

So here goes.

A speech from the President of Iraq, courtesy of the Brookings institute, where he gave the speech this morning.

Here's a quote:

Indeed, the good news from Iraq is that the new Iraqi constitution is not a perfect document. The equally good news is that nobody is wildly enthusiastic about the new Iraqi constitution and that no blood was spilled in the writing of the constitution. We talked, we sometimes disagreed, but we were, at least most of us, always committed to settling our differences through dialogue and compromise.

Here's another:

We are the heart of the Middle East. Win in Iraq, and the region will change for the better just as Iraq has advanced away from its appalling legacy. Lose in Iraq, and then all of the gains that democrats and dissidents have made across a vast swathe of the Islamic world, not just the Middle East, will be lost. Lose in Iraq, and a more perverted new dictatorship will emerge in the rump of that country, vengeful and uncompromising.

From Brookings

Back in May, I wrote a piece called Goose Stepping Hippies where I made fun of one of our local health food stores for being overly anal about the use of their parking lot. I thought it was particularly bad on their part, because as a customer of that store, I knew that more often then not, it was the health food store’s customers who were parking at the bookstore, not the reverse. The only time there are more then 3 people in that bookstore normally is the 3 times a year students are trading in their old textbooks for pizza cash.

Unfortunately, my smacking them around didn’t have the desired effect. If anything, things have escalated. Now if you go to the health food store they’ll warn you that if you didn’t park in their particular section of the conjoined parking lot, your car might get booted and towed. In other words, they’ve resorted to WAD, Weapons of Automotive Detention.

Presumably what is going to happen next is that they are going to paint borders on the parking lot. There will be the “bookstore zone”, the “gas station zone”, and the “health food zone”. Border guards and checkpoints will come next, followed by peace keeping troops after tensions break out between the people buying Slim Jims™ at the convenience store and the vegans.

Yep, I can see it all now. We’ll have to have a United Lots or UL, with a Parking Council made up of ambassadors from each business. Then if customers from one business “invade” the parking lot of the other business, the “Parking Council” can institute “sanctions”.

Of course someone will violate those sanctions (probably people who need both gas for their car and granola for their tummy). This will no doubt lead to some parking log superpower like say, WalMart™, invading the gas station in order to make the world safe for shopping.

Or maybe everyone could just lighten up. Because its not just these three businesses either. It seems like every business in town has peed on certain parking spaces while other businesses have peed on others. Whenever I go shopping at a local business its like playing Monopoly™ except I never seem to get $200 for passing Go.

Some businesses, like the place where I had coffee this morning not only are insisting that only “their” customers park in “their” parking spaces, but now have conditions! According to their new sign, they would rather people not use their parking lot for car pooling, car repair, skiing, and a couple of other things. I can understand them asking nicely that people not use their parking lot as a “Park-N-Ride” service (profit before the environment after all), but it seems to me that if your car breaks down, unless you have magical teleportation powers, you’re going to have to fix it where it lies. Though the prohibition against skiing confuses me, given that the sign is new, its summer, and the sign is hand lettered so it won’t last until winter…

For all that it has become the mission in life of the Daily Sun (our local crappy Pulitzer-owned paper) to rag on WalMart at every opportunity, I notice that they aren’t particularly anal about their parking lots. In fact, come to think of it, every major corporation in town is fairly relaxed about their parking. The exception would be the banks downtown, but only during business hours from what I’ve seen. In fact, I generally won’t go downtown until after the banks close just for that reason.

Perhaps the small businesses in town could learn something from the big businesses in town. It’s not your parking lot. It’s our parking lot, because we're the customers. We give you money, and you do what we say. That’s the way it works. If you want to start giving us money, we’ll think about doing what you say. But until then, lighten up, and stop telling us what to do. We’ll park where we damn well please, and if you don’t like it, we’ll be more then happy to stop doing business with you.

Technorati Tags: Flagstaff

So the Opinionated Wife last week went and helped the National Guard collect stuff for Katrina relief. It was organized by Becky Dagget, who is famous in Flagstaff for her organizing Proposition 100. Proposition 100 was basically the “no WalMart Supercenter in Flagstaff” proposition. She hates WalMart with a passion.

However, the most generous business in town for Hurricane relief was WalMart.

At one point, Becky was talking to them, and they asked her to coordinate with someone at the corporate office, and she assumed that they wanted positive publicity. She told them that she would try, but that wasn't her main priority to get positive publicity for WalMart. They laughed and said that they didn't care about that, but that they had better sources of information then she did, so they could make sure supplies got to where they were best needed.

In fact, the local WalMart donated mostly diapers and such because based on where the local National Guard was going, that's what was most needed.

Meanwhile, one of the women working with my wife asked one of the National Guard guys if he would rather be in New Orleans or Iraq. He said Iraq, because if you shot an Iraqi by accident you could probably talk your way out of it, but if you shot an American citizen, that would follow you around for life.

I don't know what any of that means (I'm sure ernie will have a few choice comments) but I thought I'd pass that along.

I was on a business trip last week, so I missed most of the Katrina news. Luckily, here's a timeline

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

Technorati Tags: 2000 Election, 2004 Election, Bush, Gore, Iraq, Kerry, Vietnam