Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Movie Review - Killing Season

DeNiro. Travolta. One on one shoot 'em up. Should be good, I'm thinking. But I thought wrong. Travolta spends the entire movie with a fake Serbian accent that makes you think he has rocks in his mouth. He was barely understandable. He, oh so realistically, tracks down a man (DeNiro) who shot him during the war and seeks his revenge....in the USA, of course. DeNiro plays a hermit army officer who is guilty of war crimes (against Travolta). Of course, no US soldiers participated in the Bosnian war and the idea that a member of a known Serbian death squad could get into the US is mind boggling.

They spend most of the movie alternately hunting and torturing each other and each one manages to let the other escape so that the games can continue. I only paid $7 to see this in streaming mode from Amazon. Don't pay any more than that to see it.

Monday, July 22, 2013

News from Dubai

A Norwegian woman has been pardoned and allowed to exit the country. Her crime? She was raped.

Yes, the 24 year old interior designer was raped by a co-worker but when she reported the crime to police, she was arrested for "having sex outside the marriage". She was detained and sentenced to 16 months but she was able to get a call home and her parents alerted the embassy. Since the publicity was not going to look good for the Emirate, and because it was Ramadan, she was pardoned.

This, folks, is a simple example of how Islam treats women.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Obama and Race

Obama recently said that what happened to Trayvon Martin could have happened to him. Lets take a look at that statement....

Obama was raised in Hawaii and went to The Punahou School, an elite private school. As a non-Hawaiian living in the islands he would have been called a "haole", a semi-derogative term for non-islanders. At the worst, he would have been called a "hapa haole" or half haole. Note that haole does not differentiate between white or black - it refers only to your Polynesian heritage. So, racially, he would have been lumped in with all the other white people on the island.

Also, as a student at Punahou, he would have been insulated from the racial tension between the Polynesians and haoles normally seen in high schools in Hawaii. When my father moved us to Pearl Harbor in the 60s, he was told that there only two schools for a white boy, Punahou or Radford HS. Radford because it had the majority of the military brats and was mostly white.

Finally, because he was in Hawaii during the era of racial strife in the south, he had no idea of what was going on and by his own admission he was stoned most of the time.

I wish someone would ask him how smoking weed at a prestigious private school in Hawaii means he has any knowledge of the black experience.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Ramadan Mubarak!

Ramadan starts today. Be alert.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Energy Return on Investment

Take a look at the chart below.

This chart shows the ratio of energy returned to the amount of energy invested in developing the source. It could be considered a measure of efficiency. You will note that bio-diesel is at the bottom of the curve. It has a ration of about 1.3. Corn ethanol does not do much better. This is because both require a large amount of energy to make and provide only a little more energy than are used to develop them. Hydro is at the top because after an initial investment to build the dam, you can get a continuous source of energy from it.

Scrolling through the chart you can see that nuclear is about 15, wind is about 20, world oil production is about 40 and coal is about 80. The red cross is where experts think shale gas will fall. Shale gas - that's the stuff you get from fracking that the greenies are so against.

If you were investing your money, where would you want to invest it?

Here's another version of the chart.



Monday, July 1, 2013

Head Count

Saudi Arabia, in ramping up to the upcoming lull during Ramadan, beheaded 7 criminals. They were a mix of druggies, murderers and armed robbers. This brings their mid year total to 50. Contrary to concerns about running out of swordsmen and having to revert to the old fashioned firing squad, these were all done in the proper manner of public beheading with the sword.