Saturday, July 05, 2008

I'd love to see everyone do this

Here's a great letter, which I found posted on imao.us

I'm not 100 percent sure it's genuine, but it should be.  I think it says pretty much everything that needs to be said, in a nice, succinct manner.




Monday, June 30, 2008

Thought for the Day, Part II

Here's a slightly less "important" thought, but it's one that occurred to me yesterday.  

A "Killer" is someone who "kills".  A "shooter" is someone who "shoots".  A "thinker" is someone who "thinks".

And yet, a "Pest" is someone who "pesters".

Isn't that backwards?

Think about it.

Thought for the Day, Part I

I first posted this on Grouchy Old Cripple, as a comment on a piece about the price of oil and it's effects.  Several people noted that it seems like a good point.  So here we go again:

The folks who argue that drilling in ANWR won't do much for the cost of oil seem to miss a point.  If we get all our oil from the Mideast, it must be shipped here.  There are transportation costs, of which one of the biggest is the tanker itself.

How much fuel does an oil tanker use?  These are massive vessels, carrying massively large loads.  I'm pretty sure they move at a relatively slow pace (much slower than a destroyer, for instance).

So if a tanker has to haul these gigantic cargos halfway around the world, plodding along at a slow pace, then they must be using fuel at a prodigious rate.

Now here's a thought exercise:  Compare the amount of fuel used to move a supertanker halfway around the world to the amount of fuel used to move a similar amount of fuel down a pipeline from ANWR to, say, Juneau.

Then, let's contemplate how many tankers there are on the oceans of the world.  It probably takes at least 10 tanker loads to fuel the US for a single day.  Toss in all the other countries that use oil- China for instance- and consider that my S.W.A.G. (scientific wild-ass guess) of 10 loads would require a convoy of 10 tankers sailing every day.  If it takes (another S.W.A.G. here) 15 days for a tanker to travel from the Persian Gulf to the US, then that means there are 150 tankers enroute to the US on any given day.  And by extension, another 150 enroute back to the Gulf.

How much fuel do those hypothetical 300 tankers use?  And since I suspect it's a considerable amount, how does that impact worldwide demand for oil?  And since we know that the transportation costs are passed along to the consumer, how much are we paying to move the oil from Point A to Point B?  And do the figures cited for how many barrels of oil are used per day (BPD, for the initiated) include this number?

I have a hunch that the answers are somewhat uncomfortable.  I suspect that we're seeing a lot of oil getting burned just for the sake of transit, and that it does have some impact on oil costs.  But if it were to be quantified, and shown to the American people, then they might get uppity ideas about finding closer sources and more efficient ways to move oil.

Which might bring us back to ANWR.  And we can't have that.  God knows we can't do anything to cause discomfort for the mosquitos there.

Think about it.

A WTF? Post

Here's a non-Ace post.  Gates of Vienna put this up the other day.  As a reader can see, I made my opinion clear right from the get-go.  And my opinion hasn't changed or mellowed in the least.  I still have no idea what the author was getting at.

Irony is pointless, methinks, without some kind of context.  And this moron slaps this garbage up (rather, gives it to GoV to slap up), and then runs and hides.  Notice that the author never shows up in the comments.  He just leaves it to Baron Bodissey to defend him.

In fairness, I seem to recall a couple other pieces by the same author, also posted by GoV.  And while they didn't offend me the way this one did, they were equally stupid.

Sadly, I sometimes feel that GoV has slipped dramatically the last few months.  The comments especially are often nothing more than a haven for the incredibly arrogant and stupid.

Yours truly excepted, of course.

And speaking of which...

Here we have more proof that Democrats are the lowest form of life in the universe.  They always go on about "counting every vote", "supporting the little guy" and all that other crap that might possibly have been true once.  But when it comes right down to it, they're as fascist as they accuse conservatives of being.

Look in the mirror, crap-birds.  You are the evil you warn us about.

Another one from Ace.  He and the Gang of Morons are on fire.  As always.

Stupid Democrat Tricks

I saw this story somewhere last night.  My first thought was that it was a joke.  But then I remembered that A) Democrats have no sense of humor, and B) Democrats have no shame.  So I knew it had to be true.

I'm floored.  It literally seems that, every time I think these pieces of crap have hit the lowest point possible, they manage to not only get lower, but by several orders of magnitude.

Hat tip once again to Ace and the Gang.