Saturday, June 12, 2010

Abby Safe on Board Ile de la Reunion

Abby was safely transferred to the French fishing vessel Ile de la Reunion in the early hours of our morning. Fortunately, the weather had calmed down enough that a dinghy was able to be dispatched for Abby to climb into and to bring her close to the 100′ steel vessel.

We were able to speak to Abby very briefly once the transfer was complete. She sounded tired but good. She had a good sense of humor but was clearly in the early stages of coming to grips with everything.

We don’t have much more info at this time. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Center is working with other ships in the area to determine another transfer to a vessel that will either bring her north of Mauritius to the island of La Reunion or east to Perth, Australia. Either way, it will likely be several weeks before Abby is back home in California.

We would like to give our immeasurable thanks to all of those involved in Abby’s successful rescue. Especially to the authorities, both national and international, that have worked together to successfully conduct this rescue. These include MAMSA RCC Australia, Maritime RCC La Reunion, Qantas, WA Police, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia, Defence and the three ships which are responding. Their professionalism and the great value that they placed on Abby’s life has been a gift to us that we can never repay. Thank you for caring for our daughter as if she were your own, for answering all of our many questions cheerfully and completely and for going above and beyond our wildest expectations to keep Abby safe. Thanks also to Congressman Elton Gallegly! Congressman Gallegly had offered his help to us some time ago. Thursday, when things looked bleak, a call to Congressman Gallegly resulted in his staff engaging three agencies in minutes. In less than 5 minutes the State Department, with location coordinates in hand, was in full swing with our country’s friends. Thank you Mr. Gallegly! Your concern for Abby is greatly appreciated.

We are not certain what will happen to Wild Eyes at this time. It is highly unlikely that she will be able to be saved. As we told Abby this morning, she is the most valuable piece of ‘equipment’ on that boat. The loss of Wild Eyes will be felt deeply by Abby who poured so much blood, sweat and tears into her and who has been, in a sense, one with her for many months now.

Godspeed Abby as you make your way home! We love you!!!

Mom, Dad, kids and the rest of Team Abby

Saturday, June 12, 2010

A Note from Abby

Hey everyone,
Sorry I haven’t written in so long as you probably already know I had a pretty rough couple of days. I can’t write much now as I am typing on a french key pad as well as trying to stay seated in a bouncy fishing boat.

The long and the short of it is, well, one long wave, and one short mast (short meaning two inch stub.) I’ll write a more detailed blog later, just wanted to let every one know I am safe and sound on a great big fishing boat headed I am not exactly sure where.

Crazy is the word that really describes everything that has happened best.

Within a few minutes of being on board the fishing boat, I was already getting calls from the press. I don’t know how they got the number but it seems everybody is eager to pounce on my story now that something bad has happened.

There are plenty of things people can think of to blame for my situation; my age, the time of year and many more. The truth is, I was in a storm and you don’t sail through the Indian Ocean without getting in at least one storm. It wasn’t the time of year it was just a Southern Ocean storm. Storms are part of the deal when you set out to sail around the world.

As for age, since when does age create gigantic waves and storms?

I keep hitting the wrong keys and am still trying to get over the fact that I will never see my Wild Eyes again. So Ill write more later.

Abby

Some Perspective on the Oil

Posted by Lew Rockwell on June 11, 2010 09:25 AM

Writes Daniel Mahaffey:

Just for fun, I looked at how fast the Gulf of Mexico is filling with oil.

• The Gulf’s volume is approximately 2.5 quadrillion cubic meters, 660 quadrillion gallons (660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons) or 600,000 cubic miles.
• Estimates of the oil released vary from 40 million to 100 million gallons. Let’s use 66 million gallons to make the arithmetic easy.
• The amount of oil released is 1/10,000,000,000 of the volume of the Gulf (one ten billionth).
• If it has taken 53 days to release 66 million gallons, it will take 530,000,000,000 days to fill the Gulf of Mexico. That’s 1.8 trillion years.
• If the earth is 4.54 billion years old, it would take 400,000 earth ages to fill the Gulf.
• If the universe is 13.75 billion years old, it would take 130,000 ages of the universe to fill the Gulf.

Stop! This is not possible. Here’s another view:

• Tiber field (on which the platform was drilling) contains 250,000,000 barrels of oil (at 42 gallons per barrel).
• At 66 million gallons per 53 day period, it would take 8,400 days to drain Tiber field (23 years).
• If emptied, Tiber field would cover the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf surface with 0.00098 (about 1/1000) inch of oil after 23 years.

The point of all this is perspective. We are very small so everything looks big to us. When journalists report massive oil plumes underwater, or foot deep oil collections on shore, we should be aware that things are still very, very small relative to the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico. The plumes may not actually be massive, and the oil may not be 1 foot deep everywhere. None of this is intended to excuse BP—it’s just perspective.

Why Are Environmentalists Complaining . . .

Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo on June 1, 2010 10:29 AM

. . . about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? If the oil wasn’t being spilled into the gulf it would be refined into gasoline, pumped into our cars, and producing more air pollution. Aren’t they opposed to that, too? Isn’t that why they all drive around in those funny looking little toy “hybrid” cars?

the sort of nonsensical snide-shit the average LRC blogger thinks funny. let’s all have a collegial knob rub, if you will.

and BTW, pollyanna overcompensating douches at LRC, oil spills suck. they are not groovy. lew sets the silly tone, and the lemmings charge. all hail oil spills! something-something in latin!

retards.

Scratch a modern Southerner sporting a Confederate flag, and likely you’ll find a simpering faggot enthralled by US federal attachments. The odds are not absolute, but dreadful still. I see no way the beast Lincoln could have triumphed more completely in his vile aim than to have Southerners worshiping the consuming federal state while claiming Confederate heritage.

David Boreanaz went public today with his extra-marital affair after Gloria Allred contacted Boreanaz’s lawyer and demanded six figures … sources tell TMZ.

David admitted to PEOPLE mag he had a relationship with a woman — NOT RACHEL UCHITEL — but “She asked for money. I felt as though I was being blackmailed….”

TMZ knows what went down. We’re told Boreanaz had a short-term relationship with the woman — one source says they hooked up “2 or 3 times.” Sources say he started paying her money — several thousand dollars here and there — but she began demanding more, threatening to go public with the affair. Boreanaz then confessed the affair to Jaime Bergman, his wife of 9 years.

Enter Gloria Allred, who reps the mistress. Allred contacted Boreanaz’s lawyer — legal pit bull Marty Singer — and demanded 6 figures.

Boreanaz then blunted the attack by going public with his affair. He has refused to pay the mistress another cent.

as voluntarists know, the problem here is not blackmail, but the violence-based guild, its tongue up the state’s ass.

[...] One thing is clear: The thinking that got us into this mess is unlikely to rescue us. It might come as some consolation to know that even some of the most respected minds have been forced to puzzle over their faulty assumptions. Perhaps the most pained admission of ignorance happened in a crowded room in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when, on October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan described the failure of his worldview.

Greenspan was one of the acknowledged legislators of the world’s economy over the past nineteen years in his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve. A card-carrying member of the free market brigade, he used to sit at the feet of Ayn Rand who, although largely unknown outside the United States, remains influential long after her death in 1982. Her 1957 book Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic business moguls fight the scourge of government officials and union organizers, has once again scaled the best-seller lists. Regarding altruism as “moral cannibalism,” Rand was the cheerleader for an extreme free market libertarian school of thought, which she called “Objectivism.” Drawn into her circle by this heady philosophy, Greenspan earned himself the nickname “the Undertaker” for his jolly demeanor and dress sense. When Greenspan chose a career in government, it was rather like a hippie joining the marines, a lapse that his former friends could never forgive. Despite this, Greenspan remained largely faithful to Rand’s philosophy, continuing to believe that egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster. [...]

got that? “Greenspan remained largely faithful to Rand’s philosophy” while “one of the acknowledged legislators of the world’s economy over the past nineteen years in his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve.”

ROFL. what a fucking dumbass. and he’s selling that swill to every ignorant jackass who considers the R word the good soviet citizen’s best defense against rationality. it’s the ultimate cluster-fucking rand invocation, for in assigning to greenspan permanent rand student status, you have the backward super-option of declaring the most execrable destructive anti-market action to be the purest emanation of the supposed goddess of all that is free marketry. good work, sophist fuck. the scariest bit is thinking of the poltroons nodding heads in agreement with the scam — a scam intended to enrich narcissist raj patel financially and politically.

millions of pounds of enraged megabytes on the internet regarding greenspan’s early and steadfast betrayal of market principle, and after he employs for years the skankiest tactics from the state’s sleeve, the resulting disaster may be written off to free market principle.

c’mon. are we children? who believes this rot? seriously, find out, because they are your worst general enemy.

of course there’s more sophistry in the two-paragraph snippet above, including the common straw man bullshit of the supposed marketeer’s excoriation of “any form of restraint”. all garbage from a state-slurping sociopath who obviously aims to become the state.

Our road is a county road, which means that state trucks don’t throw down salt and other chemicals (that contaminate our wells), but the county trucks heroically have been coming up and down Pocahontas Road and at least making it passable. (I notice that at least one heroic local guy has been making the rounds with his own plow, thus showing that it is not just government that keeps our road from turning into a big snow drift.)

that’s just an unusual level of herocity, god almighty. the local guy and the county parasites? a fortunate, fortunate man.

wondering aloud what he was up to (some people had already stopped us to express interest in the car), my friend asked if he should check him out. suspecting what it turned out to be, i agreed.

we pulled around to the other side of the park, with dipshit boy stepping up his savior-of-the-universe button pressing. my friend asked, “can i help you with something?”

the dumbass crossed in front of the car and aimed directly at the “license” plate. by god, there would be no second 9/11 on his watch.

blah blah blah. you know the rest. this fuck had noted a circular urging residents to be “vigilant”, so a car driving slowly over frozen grass for an obvious photo shoot became his big opportunity. pretending we didn’t think he was a pathetic doof, we talked him down while also alerting him subtly that my friend was much better friends with his landlord than he’d ever be.

this is the new america, courtesy of the small fry with brain deficiency and ridiculous dreams of relevance, fed by the professional criminals he was ready to call.

Good News in the War Against Drugs

Posted by David Kramer on October 27, 2009 05:47 AM

3 DEA AGENTS KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN COPTER CRASH, FIRST DEATHS OF THIS KIND THERE

Three Drug Enforcement Administration agents were killed Monday when a U.S. military helicopter went down in the west of Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. The casualties mark the first DEA deaths in Afghanistan since the drug agency began operations there in 2005. Seven U.S. service members were also killed in the crash in the west of the country. Officials say the helicopter had left the scene of a fire fight with insurgents.

“DEA is an extremely tight family, and the death of these three brave [emphasis mine] agents is a devastating loss* for us,” DEA administrator Michele Leonhart said in a statement. “No expressions of grief can adequately convey the depth of the collective sorrow that we feel for their loved ones.”

In the same way that I wouldn’t have been upset 200 years ago hearing that some government agent was killed while trying to stop a Black slave from the South who was fleeing for his freedom; in the same way that, since I consider the U.S. attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal actions and, therefore, do not support the U.S. soldiers cum murderers over there—nor have any sympathy for any U.S. soldiers who are killed over there; as a Libertarian I have no sympathy for any person killed while working for any gunvernment agency that is involved in preventing human beings from having control over their own bodies (which obviously includes what they put in their bodies). Does this make me a heartless person? No. It makes me an honest person.

“Brave” agents. Do you know what brave is? Standing up against all gunvernment tyranny—not just the obvious ones like our criminal military wars.
_______________________________
*How about the devastating loss to the families of many innocent civilians who die every day because recreational drugs are illegal and, therefore, has created a criminal class of people that commit murder during a robbery to support their drug habits? Without “brave” DEA agents to enforce the un-Libertarian drug laws, those civilians would not have been murdered.

dickboy kramer normally leads with his netnoob malapropisms and idjit-gimmick asterisk shtick, but today he decided to go full on against lew’s overt doctrine and sense, wrongly. it is not “Good News in the War Against Drugs” when crime syndicate agents die as in this story, and only a tag-along idiot would make that publi-seeking leap under herbert spencer.

david kramer, you should 1) STFU, 2) get the hell off the LRC blog permanently, and 3) raise your dumbass head above the fence again, after years of contemplation and improvement, only on your personal blog. like many LRC wanks, you seriously need a personal blog. get there, moron.

if lew doesn’t demand an edit/deletion on that post, i’ll be surprised. check back and see! ]]> http://saltypig.com/2009/10/you-gave-him-the-keys-lew/feed/ 0 http://saltypig.com/2009/10/dilorenzo-inventor/ http://saltypig.com/2009/10/dilorenzo-inventor/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:05:00 +0000 saltypig http://saltypig.com/2009/10/dilorenzo-inventor/ puffer TDil writes,

Some time ago I invented the phrase “fascialism” to describe the American system of political economy.

this implies, though doesn’t assert, he was the first to do so. appears he wasn’t. this word is so obviously necessary and accurate (to shove under the noses of boneheads who insist that fascism and socialism are opposites) that TDil’s invention, if true, simply puts him in line behind people who’d already done it. when i checked after my “invention” of the word in 2007, it had been done before, with no TDil in sight.

next stop, “the long tail“! gawd almighty. fire up the catchy-book-title machine and run with “your” word, dilorenzo.