Who said golf was boring?

Today the improbable U.S Open came to its inevitable end.  Of all people, Rocco Mediate was challenging to win a major championship.  Safely in the clubhouse with a one-stroke lead, he watched as Lee Westwood and Tiger Woods both had putts of about 12 feet to force a playoff. 

Westwood is a good player who never quite lived up to his promise.  When he was younger, they said he was England's answer to Tiger Woods.  Maybe in the Ryder Cups, but he's had an up and down career, never winning a major championship.  Predictably, he missed his putt, and had to settle for third place.  Also predictably, Tiger was Tiger, and his putt found the edge of the cup and fell in.

It's impossible not to like Rocco Mediate.  Guys named "Rocco" usually break other guys' legs for a living; it's rare for a Rocco to end up on the PGA tour.  But this guy doesn't look like a Rocco.  He doesn't even look like a golfer.  He's short and pudgy, and looks like he could have been cast to play the Penguin in one of the Batman movies.

He's 45 years old now, hasn't won a tournament in six years, and only won five times in his entire career.  He had to qualify just to get into the U.S. Open, playing against kids half his age who were outdriving him by fifty yards.  He's a jumpy little guy with such a herky-jerky swing that I still can't see how he manages to get all the parts of his body moving in the same direction when hits the ball.  But he loves the game and the crowds, and doesn't mind that he has to hit six-irons when Tiger is hitting a wedge.

Yet here he was, this Cindarella story forcing Tiger to an 18-hole playoff the next day.  After 10 holes, Tiger was up by three strokes, and it appeared the clock had struck midnight.  But then Rocco birdied 13 and 14, and then made a long putt to birdie 15.  Meanwhile, Tiger had started spraying the ball all over the course, and had dropped a shot.

Rocco took a one-stroke lead into the 18th hole, and had a long putt to win the Open.  I was rooting for him.  For Rocco, this would be the capstone of his career, his one and only major championship.  For Tiger, it would be just one more major in addition to his 13 other majors.

Rocco had a long birdie putt to win the U.S. Open.  He missed.  Tiger made birdie, and after 90 holes of golf, it was still a tie.  As an announcer said, Tiger Woods against a guy who looked like he should be cleaning Tiger Woods' swimming pool.  On the first sudden death hole, Rocco made a mistake, and it was over.  Yes, Tiger deserved to win.  He played on one leg, when he should have been recuperating from knee surgery.  That's just one more measure of greatness.

But Rocco is at the age where he is running out of chances to win a major, and I doubt we will hear from him again.  I can only hope that somehwere out there is a parallel universe in which Tiger's putt lipped out on the 72nd hole, and a portly little crowd favorite is now the U.S. Open champion.

Oil at $139/barrel

Last week Iranian President Ahmadinejad said Israel would disappear.  It's not the first time he's said Israel would be wiped off the map.  But this time, the Israeli Transport Minister responded, saying Ahmadinejad would disappear before Israel did.

If Israel (or the United States) attacks Iran, $139 oil will seem like a bargain.  Overnight we could see $200 or ever $300/barrel oil.  That's what the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is for.  In case our leaders are stupid enough to start a war in the middle east (I mean ANOTHER war, besides the one we already have.)

I'm not sure what the price of gasoline would be.  Maybe $10, or more likely $15/gallon, if you could find it.  The gas lines of the 70's are nothing compared to the shortages we would see if the Strait of Hormuz closed.  For that matter, I think it is only a matter of time before we see gasoline rationing.  Maybe not this year or next year, but it is coming.

If cooler heads prevail, and the current crisis is averted until we can get George F. Bush out of the White House, the price of oil should drop back toward $100.  So I wouldn't be buying oil at this point; there's too much of a war premium built into the price.  In any event, I think natural gas is a much better play.  On a BTU basis, oil should sell for 6 times the price of NG.  Currrently NG trades for $12-13, and should be over $20 based on the price of oil.

What happened

Blog updates may be even more sporadic than usual for a while, as my computer has reached the advanced age of four, and now appears to be in its death throes.  It has suffered in recent months, no doubt due to the demands I have placed on it, and when I installed Easy Media Creator 10, that was the last straw.  It is crashing and losing its internet connection far too often, so I have ordered one of those new quad-core beasts, and it should be here in a week or so.  In the meanwhile, I am spending most of my time burning DVDs to get everything off the hard drive.

I would much rather spend my time reading Scott McClellan's new book, What Happened.  He was Bush's press secretary, and a White House insider, who just told us that all those horrible lies told by all of those horrible liberals about the Bush administration...well, they were all true.

When something like this happened in the past, the standard response from the White House was to go into attack mode, deny everything, and call the miscreant a liberal, which is even worse than being a miscreant.  The problem is that no way can the Bushies say McClellan is a liberal.  He was one of their own, going all the way back to Texas.  And they can't dispute the facts, so instead they're just hoping the story will die well before the elections.  Here's what David Galland of Casey Research had to say, along with a link to a video of Ari Fleischer.

 

Egg-Sucking Polecats

I am not a big fan of broadcast news, other than as a rare source of entertainment.

But I thought it would be informative to tune into the Bush administration’s quick counter-attack on Scott McClellan’s new book in which he basically accuses the president and his men of being, to use a colorful Southern term, a bunch of “egg-sucking polecats.”

Now I’d have to find more time in the day than presently available to do the full research required to better understand the law around such things, but if the Monica Lewinsky affair – which, as far as I could tell was an act between two consenting adults – was cause for impeachment, then what might be proscribed for deliberately starting a war on false pretenses?

Now, before those conservatives among you start jumping up and down, please understand, I am only reporting what is now being told by one of the president’s closest confidants of many years.

Might McClellan also be a polecat, just looking to sell a lot of books? No doubt. But the charges he levels are not without substantiation from other quarters. As such, one could take his revelations as being confirmatory.

But back to the broadcast news. Perhaps stung by McClellan's accusation that the media had been too soft in the run-up to the war, the CBS Evening News’ Katie Couric actually did a fairly tough interview with Ari Fleischer, McClellan’s former boss.

Thanks to YouTube, you can view her interview and I would highly recommend you do, as it is a masterful lesson in political spin. You can see the specific talking points unfurling (that somehow McClellan’s words were taken over by some liberal editor and that Scottie could have never really meant those)… and you will love the part when Mr. Fleischer says something to the effect of “I don’t want to pre-judge Scott, but will wait to hear his defense.”

I had to finger my ear on that one, just to assure that a buildup of wax wasn't somehow skewing sound.

We are talking here about a deception (to use McClellan’s term) that has cost tens of thousands of lives, ruined our military, cost on the order of $2.5 trillion, destroyed America’s prestige around the world and spawned a whole new global reordering of alliances… and… and… but it is McClellan who needs to defend himself?

Call me old fashioned, but I think it is time to call a polecat a polecat. And President Bush and his cronies are, at least in my book, polecats. Here’s the video.

Video: Eye To Eye: Ari Fleischer (CBS News)

 

Last and least, if anyone out there wants to find out what a liberal is (as opposed to what the right-wingers say) here is a web site with a test you can take.  At the end it gives you a result based on your left/right and libertarian/authoritarian scores.

Mine were left/right -2.50 and libertarian/authoritarian -3.95.  Basically that means I believe in freedom, but I don't have my head up my butt.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Capital controls, here we come

It must be an election year.  Senator Lieberman is trying to pass legislation to discourage speculation in crude oil.  It's those greedy speculators that are driving up the price of oil.  So if he has his way, pension funds won't be able to invest in oil.

Trouble is, it's not just oil that's going up.  It's also natural gas, silver, gold, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, iron, lead, corn, wheat, soybeans, and just about any other commodity you could name.  The real problem is that it's not these commodities going up as much as it is the US dollar going down.

That's how we protect ourselves from the depreciation of our currency; we buy stuff that might hold its value.  A year from now, I expect the price of oil, gold, silver, and anything else tangible to cost more because the government is increasing the money supply at the rate of at least 16% a year.

Maybe Senator Lieberman and his colleagues in Congress and the frat boy in the White House could start spending our money as though it were THEIR money.  Then they wouldn't have to monetize the debt that foreign central banks have finally learned not to buy.  We've only been running this scam for 37 years, but they finally figured out there hasn't been anything backing our dollars since 1971.

I happened to be in England in August, 1971 when then-President Nixon dissolved the Bretton Woods agreement, and decided to let the dollar float.  He really didn't have any choice.  Those dastardly French suspected that gold was worth a lot more than 35 of our dollars, and started demanding payment in real money.  Fort Knox would have emptied in a hurry (which it probably is anyway, but that's another story) if Nixon didn't close the gold window when he did.

But I digress.  As we enter the Way Back Machine again, it's August, 1971.  My dad was working in England on business, so I spent six weeks there.  But when the dollar floated (i.e sank)our money was no good.  For a couple of days we had to eat all of our meals in the hotel restaurant because no one knew what a dollar was worth.  We didn't have a lot of local currency, and we normally charged meals to a company credit card, but the good people at VISA had no idea how many dollars a British pound was worth.

So here we are again.  We have lots of dollars; we just can't use them to buy anything useful, like for instance oil.  So take my advice and buy oil, gold, silver and anything else of value while you can.  Because soon these things will be rationed, and with rationing comes shortages.  Tried to buy a Silver Eagle from the US Mint lately?

I agree with Bush

Anyone who reads this blog has probably figured out by now that I have no love for George F. Bush.  But for the first time in seven (7) years,  I agree with him.  Specifically I agree with his decision not to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  Congress actually only wants to stop adding to it, especially with crude oil at all-time high prices.  Bush has threatened to veto the legislation.

The SPR is there in case of emergency.  Our economy runs on oil, and if there are shortages, it will come to a grinding halt.  It is appropriate to use the SPR if we're at war.  If an oil tanker is sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, that's an emergency.  If a hurricane wrecks the refineries on the Gulf Coast, that's an emergency.  $4 a gallon gas is not an emergency.  "It costs too much  to fill up my SUV or Hummer" is not an emergency.  If you use the oil when gas is $4, you won't have it next year when gas could be $7.  Of course next year isn't an election year, which is what this is all about.  If you're really concerned about high gas prices, buy some shares of UGA to lock in today's gas price for the rest of your life, and from then on you'll smile every time you fill your tank.

One more thing on the SPR:  I'm aware that filling it at all-time high prices is not cost effective.  But if you give the government the latitude to decide exactly when to buy the oil, I know exactly what will happen.  Goldman Sachs will make lots of money trading oil futures, and the crude will cost the government even more.

There, I said it.  I agree with Bush.  It's the first time in seven years, and I don't plan to make a habit of it.  He's threatening the veto for all of the wrong reasons of course.  Gotta remember, he and Dick (conservation doesn't work) Cheney are oil men.  They don't have to run for re-election, and a high oil price helps their buddies in the oil patch.  But filling the SPR will be important in the times of shortage to come, so for once in his life, Bush was correct, even if he did it by accident.

Good bye zinc standard

Today the House of Representatives voted to change the composition of the penny.  It seems zinc is too expensive to use to fabricate pennies.

There was a time when this country was on a gold standard.  Coins were 90% gold.  From the $1 coin to the $20 double-eagle, the bigger the coin, the more gold it contained, and the more valuable it was.

There was a time when our money was redeemable in silver.  Those banknotes in your wallet stopped saying "silver certificate" a long time ago.  Now they are federal reserve notes.

Until 1982, our pennies were made out of copper.  Then copper became too expensive, so we had to switch to zinc.  Fast-forward 26 years, and now even zinc is too expensive.  So the House passed legislation directing the U.S. Mint to start producing pennies made from steel within the next nine months. 

The Senate hasn't taken up the matter, so it isn't a done deal yet.  Rep. Space (that's his real name) of Ohio said it was an insult to the taxpayers that we are spending more to produce coins than they are worth.  His legislation would save us $1 billion over the next ten years.

I think the much larger insult to the American people is that our money isn't worth anything any more.  At least now we can save pennies and nickels that have real value, based on the copper, nickel and zinc they contain.

We made pennies out of steel once before, in 1943.  Of course we had a good reason back then.  We were trying to win World War II.  I don't mind the government running deficits and spending money excessively if the future of civilization is at stake.  What is our excuse now?

Back in 1943, for one year the pennies were gray, and they really stand out.  This time, our pennies will be copper-plated steel, so they will still look the same color.  Haven't we seen this before?

In ancient Rome, the denarius was made out of silver.  But during the reign of Nero (the one who fiddled) they debased the currency, reducing the silver content.  This continued under bad emperors and even good ones who liked to fight expensive wars (Trajan) so by the third century AD, the coin was renamed the antoninianus, and it was made of bronze.  But to maintain appearances, it was coated with a thin wash of silver.  Not that this fooled anyone.  The coating wore off very quickly, and everyone knew the coins were made of bronze.

Rome very nearly fell in the third century, and only a succession of army-emperors saved it by turning it into a virtual police state, run by bureaucrats who deprived their subjects of whatever freedom they had left for another two centuries until the whole rotten structure was finally (and deservedly) overrun.

Is that our fate?  It depends on our leadership.  They say God looks out for babies, drunks, and the United States of America.  Instead of hoping for divine intervention, it is time to make hard decisions and accept that we need to pay $8/gallon for gas like every other country in the world.  That we need more doctors and more access to health care.  Most of all, we need to live within our means, instead of living off the savings of the rest of the world.  Good luck finding a leader who will say those things to the American people.

The worst day in retirement

The worst day in retirement is still WAY better than the best day at work.  I have just passed the first anniversary of my retirement.  One full year of not having to brief pilots who don't know what they're flying, or where they are, or where they want to go, and don't know how long it will take them to get there...but they want a standard weather briefing.

I admire people who derive satisfaction from their job, and find their work too challenging to quit.  Especially those guys who say they can't conceive of themselves being retired, because they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.  I salute all of you, because if everyone retired like me, the whole country would grind to a halt.

Another good reason to retire came last week (April 21, to be exact) when Lockheed Martin held a pilot's meeting at Oakland Airport to promote the abortion they call FS21.  Of course I didn't go to the meeting; since I retired my BS tolerance isn't what it used to be.

They had room for well over a hundred people, but a grand total of 13 pilots showed up.  There were 19 people there in total, but 5 of those were from OAK AFSS, and 1 was a non-combatant (the spouse of a pilot.)  From what I have been told it was a complete waste of time...the oily LM/former FAA guy who hasn't worked at a station in 20 years trying to convince everyone things are getting better.  He would probably have had a better chance of selling the Golden Gate Bridge, but that's just me being cynical again.