Really, you don’t say? Economic advantages and disadvantages that are applied through government regulation can lead to ethnic unrest? Wealth redistribution along ethnic lines makes people testy and prone to take out their frustrations on other ethnic groups?

That is just amazing!

In all honesty, it is nice to see a study that highlights this, although anyone who pays attention to African and Balkan politics and conflicts would have been able to tell you this without a study.

Here is some more on this study.

“Our study counters the idea that a liberalized economy is worse for ethnic groups. Minorities are more likely to be on the outside of the political system,” explained Saideman, associate professor and associate director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict. “So, if the government is involved in the economy, minorities are more likely to be affected by the whims of the state than by the whims of the market.”

…

“Thus groups on the outs feel threatened because they have no control, which can lead to open rebellion,” Saideman said, “while those who are in power become terrified of losing control, as occurred in Serbia. Before the war the Serbs controlled a large hunk of the Yugoslav political system and it was their fear of losing it that led to war.”

…

“Ironically, look at how the government of the United States is now in the process of buying up a large hunk of the economy to bail out Wall Street,” he said. “In the future this will give people who are denied loans or who have other economic grievances an incentive to blame the government. They won’t consider factors like oil shocks and housing bubbles, it will all be laid on the government’s doorstep.”

Since when is this a crime worthy of police action?  What next, SWAT raids if you are 6 months overdue, or if you’ve got more than 6 books overdue for a given time period (you might be a dangerous book hoarding felon)!?

To me, this is a matter for debt collection, not guns and arrests.  At some point the library should have just said, “Lady, if we don’t get those books back by the end of the week, we are sending your name to our collection agency, Blood From a Rock, LLC.”  I mean, the lady owed the library $180, I’ve been sent to collections over $30.

My wife, a public librarian, thought this was just ridiculous and seriously overstepping what a library should do to recover an overdue book.

Teen hops two six foot fences and ignores numerous warnings at Six Flags, GA and gets the Highlander Loser treatment.  Who wants to bet his parents sue that there was not enough warning that the area under a 50 mph roller coaster was dangerous?

Dickie Scruggs gets 5 years at the Federal Penitentiary and Day Spa.  In my perfect world, he’d have to spend the rest of his life working as a Public Defender, or better yet, as a low ranking attorney in the DA’s office.  Five years in the pokie means he gets three hots and a cot on the taxpayer dime when in reality, he is not a dangerous person.

The Arctic Ice is melting and will be all gone this summer!  Oh NOES!  It’s Global Warm…oh, wait, it a cubic butt ton of undersea volcanoes getting all explodey under the ice.  Move along, nothing to see here.

Local to me, today a new law goes into effect such that if you are driving and talking on the phone, you need to be using a hands free device.  Opponents of the law say that the holding of the phone is not what causes problems, but rather, the fact that a person is talking at all is the distraction.  I wonder if that is the case, why don’t drivers get arrested for talking to their passengers?  What makes a phone call so much more distracting?  Me personally, I have a much easier time staying focused on driving while using a headset than I do while holding a phone.  Not sure why.

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And a final bit of Randomness that has nothing to do with the news, and more to do with gardening at home.  We all know that containers are a great way to grow plants, but attractive clay containers are expensive, and heavy.  Foam or plastic containers may be lightweight, but they are cheap and look like it.  One way to get attractive containers and avoid the weight and the cost is to make your own.

Here’s what you do.  Go to the local crap store and buy two very large identical plastic pots (say, 18″ or more across the top).  Now go to your local building supply store and get a large bag of Portland Cement, NOT Concrete.  For those not in the know, cement is the part of concrete that, when mixed with water, gets hard and binds the gravel in concrete together.  Next, go to the garden store and get a bale or bag of peat moss and a bag of pearlite.

Now, in a tub or wheel barrow, mix equal parts cement, peat moss, and pearlite together.  Add water and stir until the mixture has the consistency of brownie mix (thick, but flowing).  Now, take your plastic pots and cover any drain holes with masking tape.  Then, put a good thick coat of veggie oil all across the inside surface of one pot, and do the same for the outside surface of the other.  Take the pot that has been greased on the inside and fill it about 1/3 full of your “concrete” mixture.  Take the other pot, the one with oil on the outside, and place it inside the first pot.  Push down and watch the concrete mixture rise up the sides.

The goal here is to have enough concrete to fill the inside pot to the top while leaving about an inch or so between the bottoms of the two pots (so the casting will have a base about an inch thick).  Shift the pots around so the sides will all be the same thickness and either place a weight in the pot to keep it in place, or set it on a flat surface and run two perpendicular ropes across the top and anchor the ropes to the ground.  In about 48 hours, you should be able to slide the pots apart (with a little effort and wiggling) and find yourself with a new, very lightweight pot.  Just gently drill a small hole in the bottom for drainage and it’s ready to go.

You can also get creative with this, and using wood forms, you can make box planters of any shape.  I’ve made planters with PVC pipes cast through them where the PVC pipe had small holes drilled every 4-6″ and the holes faced inside the box.  Fashion a standpipe with a hose fitting and you can water the box nice and quick.

Update: Fixed some links

As far as Open Carry goes, I have no problem with it personally, although except for when I am in the wilderness, I don’t do it. I carry concealed when I carry in areas where the population density goes over 20 people per square mile. However, I know of and read about people who Open Carry quite regularly, either because they are too young to get a CCW permit, or because open carry is more comfortable (it is). Some also do it as a way to try and educate the public regarding the legality of open carry and to paint a law-abiding face on the image of normal gun owner/carrier.

Now I know the great majority of persons who open carry are probably not the “in your face” kind of open carry advocates, but I know some of them are, the kind who have to declare the fact that they are armed by announcing it in public. And they argue that people who are freaked out by guns, and who feel scared or intimidated by a person openly carrying, should just put up and shut up because their feelings don’t trump others rights.

And as a matter of constitutional law, they are right, feelings don’t trump rights.

As a matter of our current “polite” society, they walk a dangerous edge. See, people don’t like feeling intimidated and threatened, and no matter how comfortable you are with something, telling someone else to “get over it” is a great way for them to get over it by pushing for a ban.

Don’t believe me, think I’m blowing smoke up your posterior orifice? Well, look into that smoke, and recall the bright heyday when you could smoke darn near EVERYWHERE!

Remember those days? Remember the days of planes, trains, and buses with a haze of Marlboro, bars and restaurants with a tinge of Camel, clubs with the minty aroma of Newports? I do, been a while though. How many of you think smoking bans are stupid? How many of you, even those who don’t smoke and don’t like it, would never deny a person their legal right to a Nic Fit?

Probably most of my readers would put up, but for those who don’t smoke, or have since quit, how many of you secretly enjoy not having to breathe smoke?

So how did smoking bans come about? Well, to put it simply, smokers were rude about it and had no consideration of the fact that smoking had an area effect. People got tired of smoky restaurants, and workplaces, and mass transit. They got tired of butts scattered about the ground next to the ashtray and along the highway. They got tired of all of it. No one cared that smoking was a legal activity, what they cared about was that smokers had to be all in your face about it, and when you asked a person to stop smoking, they threw a fit, or did something rude, like exhale in your face. In my youth, when I ran a hotel front desk, I can not tell you how many times I had people throw a temper tantrum in my lobby over the fact that we had no smoking rooms left and we would not allow them to smoke in a non-smoking room. Grown adults literally calling me names and stomping around or loudly bitching, and this was hardly a rare event, it happened multiple times, every time we had a busy run.

Of course, people tolerated all of this, right up until data started to appear regarding second hand smoke, and then suddenly they had a lever, something they could base a ban upon, because even the most libertarian could not defend a habit that while harmful to the user, might also harm a passerby. Even though the research into second hand smoke was still very preliminary, and years worth of work had to be done yet, the movement was on and smoking bans started to appear all over. My state of Washington is a No Smoking State.

I don’t want something like this to happen to open carry. I worry that a handful of overly public OC advocates will give ammunition to some overly loud Gun Control Advocates, and a precious right will be in danger just as we started to get it back. I don’t know the answer to the problem, but it is something that needs to be discussed, and as gun owners, it is imperative that while we may not agree with persons who freak out over a holstered gun, we are obligated to try and understand them, or we will never find the right combination of public display and education to make them comfortable with the idea of OC, or any other conservative idea that has value.

That all being said, I left a comment over at the Minstrels about an image he had up:

…Actually, given how much people are just fine seeing a cop or security guard with a badge and a gun, but lose it when J.Q. Public walks around with a holster on his hip, maybe issuing badges to people who want to carry open or concealed would stop some PSH.

Maybe that is what we need?

h/t Theo Spark

Nevermind that 90% of Americans would have no problem voting for a black man, it’s scary to me that even 20% of people could vote for someone so gobsmackingly stupid…

Also, I say that Obama doesn’t get to choose his ancestry for us, and say he’s “black.” He can make a statement about the culture he embraces for his own, but he’s just as white as he is black. He may as well be Ward Churchill, ascribing himself a tribe and an identity because he says so.

He has not had the “authentic” black experience –whatever that is– of the U.S.; he was raised as a person, as far as I can tell, and not as a “black person kept down by the racists,” which he would do well to return to.

I could respect him, as a “person,” but he is just another political hack using race as a leg up.

Black voters who who want to embrace Obama’s manufactured blackness are free to do so, and somehow that makes him authentic in their eyes. Love is blind, and all that. But nothing will change the fact that, as a “person,” he’s just another Chicago political player who has never been tested in the fire. Being married to an angry and unhappy woman doesn’t count.

Oh he thinks he’s been tested, and Brokaw is never going to cross the Rubicon of his career and throw a hard question at a black man, lest he seem racist. Obama’s already paving that path pretty thickly, that’s how scared he is of a real question that doesn’t contain the phrase, “as a black person…”

But let Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell have a crack at him. Let them question his experience, black or otherwise. Let them quiz him tightly on financial policy, social equity, and foreign experience, and truly slimy associations with really awful people. Let them look him in the eye when he starts spinning a whopper and have them give him the thrashing he so thoroughly has been denied. (Note to the media: you’re a bit too late to be thrashing Bill Clinton so long after the fact. It’s not that you’re just now seeing his weaknesses, you’re just now tired of them since he affords you no access to power. Not that I’m complaining; dogs and fleas and all that.)

Obama is a bit old to be so untried as a man. He may yet be a man, even a good man, but how can he know? He’s stayed in the middle of the pack, played safe, and surrounded himself in an echo-chamber for 20 years. Any man of any color would be easily picked off in the early rounds with such a personal resume.

Too many easily-opened doors, preferences, deferences, and soft-ball media interviews have made the man arrogantly overconfident of his ability to grasp things. His political tinnitus keeps him from hearing the heartbeat of his own conscience and he’s losing himself to his handlers and his own fantasies of what he thinks the job is going to take. The media is doing us no favors in protecting this guy.

Maybe America will wake up and realize that a President should be smarter than a fifth grader. But with an electorate that increasingly proves itself unfit for a game show, I don’t hold out much hope for that sort of change.

Go forth, read, and chuckle heartily.

How many of you just read that and said WTF?! Yeah, me too, then he explained himself.

Seems right now, with how wildly the price of oil is fluctuating, if an oil company publicly announced that they were purchasing a number of ships and rigs to begin pumping oil out of the Gulf or California coasts, as soon as the money was spent and the equipment ordered, it would be very likely that the price of oil would plunge as the speculators drove the price down. Good for us, bad for the oil companies.

If the price of oil drops a little (say, to $80 a barrel), life would be good as the oil companies would still make a healthy profit. If the price drops too far, say to $30 a barrel, oil companies won’t be able to reap as much profit, which would make it harder to recoup their expenses from the new equipment purchases. At $30 a barrel, while we’d be doing fine, oil companies would be bleeding money as they paid for equipment that was unable to pay for itself. Oil companies actually like the price to go down. What they really like is for the price to spike, and then settle back slowly (like it does every summer). They make tons of profit since the price of gas and diesel goes down slower than the price of crude.

So if we can’t open up new supplies, what should we do? Well, we open up new supplies, but first, we need to to stabilize the price by clamping down on speculators who are manipulating the price. From the Worcester Telegram:

Congress approved a provision that eliminates the so-called “Enron loophole,” which exempted energy speculators who make trades electronically from governmental regulation. Some argued that the unregulated energy speculation, codified in 2000, has accounted for $20 to $25 in the jump in oil prices.

Michael J. Ferrante, executive director and president of the Massachusetts Oilheat Council, said his organization and others affected connected to the oil market have been trying for years to get Congress to stop the manipulation of the oil market by speculators, some of whom boost the price by instilling concerns that the crude supply is threatened.

“There are those who make a pronouncement — a Wall Street analyst who says there’s a storm brewing, unrest in Nigeria or an increase in attacks on U.S. troops,” he said.

“These global geopolitical events, sometimes, are almost fabricated. Someone who buys paper, they own product (oil) but never actually have it. And by speculating on it they can push up the price. They can make a pronouncement and push up the price, then sell.”

He said closing the Enron loophole is a start, but is not a panacea for market manipulation. Another area Congress must examine is the so-called “dark trades” that allow trading by foreign entities to get around oversight by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

See what I mean? Now I do agree that Congress needs to open up our supplies. The leases that all our congress critters talk about the oil companies having access to are mostly fields that are too deep or too difficult to gain access to, so don’t buy into the whole “Oil companies have lots of places to drill.” crap. What they need are profitable places to drill.

One other thing the oil companies need to do is diversify more. They need to stop being oil companies and become energy companies. The Exxon shareholders just voted on forcing the company to diversify into more renewable energy markets, and although they only got a vote of about 27%, it shows that shareholders are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to exercise their responsibility and help guide their investment (rather than just selling stocks and never voting in elections).

Which is how stocks are supposed to work.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it, do some research, Google “oil speculation” or “oil futures” and see what there is out there. Me personally, I’m gonna push for my congress critter to clamp down on speculation as much as we can to stabilize things, since the market is not correcting itself like it should, and I’m afraid if it does, my oil stocks will take a serious hit.

Now I know that Ted and Hazel like to keep a clean house here, so I apologize if I intrude on anyone’s delicate nature. Ya’ll can just go somewhere else for a bit. For the rest of you that have the stomach for it, continue on past the fold.

Ok, just us now.

Your House and mine today shot down yet again a plan to open up the Outer Continental Shelf for petroleum exploration. In fact, the proposal never even made the hell out of committee. I will give you here some of the dumbassery:

“We are kidding ourselves if we think we can drill our way out of these problems,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said during the bill mark-up session.

Sierra Club lands program director Athan Manuel told a House committee Wednesday that drilling has been unsuccessful in driving costs down.

“The disappointing part about some of the energy policies being promoted (is) that it calls for more drilling when drilling really is the problem. And all we’ve got to show for pretty aggressive (domestic) drilling for the last 35 years is, again, $4 for a gallon of gas,” Manuel said, adding “since the first Arab oil shock in the 1970s, the U.S. has produced almost 90 billion barrels of oil since then, so we’ve tried drilling our way out of the problem and it just hasn’t worked.”

Environment Florida spokeswoman Holly Binns told the Media General news group that offshore drilling has no immediate impact on prices.

“It would take anywhere from seven to 10 years to bring those resources to shore — to have any measurable impact on supply,” Binns said, advocating renewable energy sources.

Well, just to be fair, (like these fuckers deserve it) I guess it will take seven to ten years to drill, then maybe they have a point. But they would be wrong. It doesn’t take seven to ten years to drill a hole in the bottom of the Gulf.

The Flatrock No. 4 (“C” location) infill development well, which commenced drilling on April 9, 2008, is located between the Flatrock No. 1 discovery and the Flatrock No. 2 wells. The No. 4 well has been drilled to 15,315 feet and log-while-drilling tools have indicated hydrocarbon bearing sands in the proven hydrocarbon column in the Rob-L section approximating 135 net feet over a total approximate 246 foot gross interval. The well will be deepened to a proposed total depth of 18,500 feet to evaluate additional targets in the Rob-L and Operc sections.

By my calculations, that means that from drilling to oil was TWO GODDAMNED MONTHS! And That was an American company operating off the coast of Louisiana, you know where Hurricane Katrina caused all the oil platforms to spill a billion barrels of oil all over the Gulf of Mexico. (THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN EITHER, YOU SLACKWIT BASTARDS.)

But you say, sure, in ten feet of water you could do that; but what about out in in deep Gulf waters? That surely would take ten years, easy. Again, you cock-gargling thundercunts, you are wrong. China started drilling Cuban waters in 2006, and now not only pumping oil out of Cuban reserves, fifty fucking miles off of Florida, but are by-damn slant drilling into the oil reserves on OUR SIDE. So not only are the policies of the august body costing Americans daily in higher prices for every single thing in our oil based economy, but their pussified policies are now allowing uncontested theft of our own assets.

And don’t you shitting dare to talk to me about the ‘environmental danger’ of ocean drilling when the TRANSPORT of foreign oil to our shores is the ONLY significant source of oil spills greater than a thousand barrels since the Valdez incident. (More oil bubbles up from the bottom the sea, Jed Clampett style, than has been spilled from any other single source.) But sixty percent, SIXTY PERCENT, of all oil spills come from transporting it, not drilling it. Transporting by ship that is.

We have enough coal to make coal gasification economically feasible. We have enough goal that we could gasify enough to last us for literally hundreds of years. Some say we could get upwards of a trillions barrels of oil just from the Rocky Mountain shale deposits and the tar sands. But even with those two things going full bore, we would still need the light sweet crude from the tits of mother nature for other things besides gasoline for your car. We need that oil for industry, for AvGas, for plastics, etc. Even if we got two hundred reactors up and running so we could all drive around in little electric deathtraps, we would STILL NEED THE GODDAMNED OIL.

So like I said, when it comes time to vote (if we get another chance that means anything) run the bastards out of town on a rail. They ain’t doing OUR work anymore.

I have nothing to add, his actions speak with more beauty and emotion than any mere words I might be able to conjure.

Click on the photo to embiggen.

Taken from the top of the Seattle Space Needle in 2006, on a warm summer afternoon. In the picture you’ll find a partial view of the Seattle Downtown, A Seaplane from Kenmore Air, Safeco and Qwest Fields, the Washington Mutual Tower, and our own quiet little Vesuvius, Mt. Rainer in the haze beyond.

We had just moved to the area a few months before and that day we had taken my Sister-in-Laws, who were 14 & 20, to do some sight seeing in downtown Seattle. We did some shopping, rode to the top of the tower for pictures, and ended up with the girls playing in various fountains near The Seattle Center, including The International Fountain. We got some great pics of the waterlogged, but very giggly, young ladies.

The photo itself was a complete accident. I had seen the seaplane flying around earlier, but I had lost track of it. My actual target was Mt. Rainer behind the city scape, the Beaver just flew in as I hit the button, giving me a great composite that combined many elements characteristic of the Emerald City and the Puget Sound.

The politics of the region amuse the hell out of me, as by and large the people vote for Democrats, and then vote against funding their projects.

I could go into some lengthy exposition about how Seattle was built on the power of American Determination and Imagination, but I think that goes without saying, as that tiny Seaplane and the various skyscrapers give testament to. Such creations are not built without determination and imagination.

Click to embiggen.

This is Denny Creek washing over the Keekwulee Falls. Taken in September of 2007, this was my first solo mountain hike in the region. I know it does not look like much, but this was September, when the snow has melted and the rain is done, so the creek is pretty low. I have pictures from further downstream that show great trees broken and jammed into the rocks along the creek, telling the tale of how powerful this little creek gets in the Spring.

The total hike for the day was 6.6 miles and I ascended 2200 feet, all with 50 lbs of gear on my back (yes, I overpacked, and I had gear that was too heavy for backpacking, I have since trimmed my loadout). My destination was the small Melakwa Lake. The day started out overcast and wet (no rain, just heavy mist), but as I was coming back, the sun came out and helped to dry me out a bit. It was my first mountain hike, and my legs hurt for days afterward, but it was so worth it. I’m hoping to go back this summer before the creek gets low so I can get some photos of the raging torrent.

If Ted and Hazel are open to it, I’d like to invite other guest bloggers to use a photo to tell a small story and share a bit of their American journey, and readers could do something similar on their own blogs, or on the Picador Project Forums. It helps sometimes to share the journeys others have taken, to remember what we fight for.

This is a Patriot’s Journey post. Remember to check out the other Patriotic Journeyers: Drumwaster, The Bastage, Inessential Musings, and The Edge of Reason