Last night, I fell asleep too early to hear the speeches, but the results were waiting for me this morning.

Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the United States in January.

While I don’t agree with some of the tactics he and John McCain used in their campaigns, and I really don’t like some of the reports of fraud and intimidation I’ve heard, the election seems to have been relatively clean overall.

I’m not going to congratulate Obama. He’s signed up for a tough, thankless job that will only get worse as he goes along. I hope he has more up his sleeve than hope, because he’s going to need it. If he can manage to be a good president when 2012 rolls around, I’ll congratulate him then.

My opinion of the man hasn’t changed, but he has 4 years to convince me that his presidency wasn’t a mistake.

If more than a couple of the following things come true under his watch, then he’s failed:

1. A major terrorist attack occurs somewhere in the homeland, and he does not respond in kind to those who conducted the attack.
2. The economy continues to go into recession and stays anemic for more than a year.
3. Either Iraq or Afghanistan becomes a failed state again. He’s been handed a relatively finished product in Iraq, and he has to figure out what to do in Afghanistan.
4. The crime rate in our country continues to climb, and he does nothing to try to stop it.

Anyhoo, the next 4 years will tell us if all of the hype was deserved. I don’t care about his approval ratings, or whether or not he’s skewered by the press. I want to see results based on what I feel is important for the country as a whole and me as an individual.

I may not respect the man, but I do respect the office he will be holding. For the sake of the country, I hope he exceeds my expectations and earns my respect.

LiveScience is reporting on a fungus that has been discovered in the rain forest that turns cellulose directly into fuel.

Use of high-sugar food crops for fuel helps to drive up prices and clamp down on the amount of food on the market. If we could make fuel from agricultural waste such as stalks and sawdust, then we’d be a lot closer to energy independence without hurting the food supply.

Then the corn could be used for the correct product, instead of fuel.

On November 4, 1979, the American Embassy in Tehran was violated by a controlled mob. This was no spontaneous escalation of a demonstration into an international incident. It was planned and approved by members of the Iranian revolutionary movement.

This deliberate, premeditated attack on American sovereignty was used to humiliate our country for 444 days. The reason the Iranians felt they could, and indeed did, get away with this was because we had the weakest excuse for a president we will ever see in the person of one James Carter. This weak willed individual allowed that 3rd world sh**hole to drag us around by the nose for over a year.

A man or woman that deserved their office would have turned Iran’s oil and agricultural industries into smoking holes that glowed in the dark for about a century and a half. The cost to the world economy would have been worth it to see the rest of the cave dwellers in the world learn that to mess with us is to invite annihilation.

Another solution would have been for the CIA to seize every single known relative of the Iranian revolutionary movement’s leadership we could find and offer to exchange them for our people and the heads of the people who violated our embassy.

Instead we got to watch on the evening news night after night as American diplomats were paraded before the cameras. We also got to listen to Carter bleat on about how he was still trying to get the hostages released peacefully.

Hopefully we never have to go through something like that again. And if we do, I pray that we have a real leader in the Oval Office instead of some blithering idiot who should have stayed on his peanut farm.

This election finally starts to end tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I don’t care if you’re in labor. Get out of bed and vote.

Take a deep breath, folks, it’s almost over.

Well, yesterday was a Man Day.

Got up early and took Girlie Bear over to her Mom’s house for the weekend. She stayed with us on Friday night so she could go trick or treating with some cousins. A good time was had by all.

From there, I went over to Knob Creek and practiced with the 91/30. I really enjoy getting there early when it’s not so busy. The regulars tend to get there early too, and they’re a great bunch of good old boys. Conditions were absolutely perfect. No wind whatsoever, as was evidenced by the smoke and dust kicked up by the large exploding target that one of my co-shooters blasted on his first shot of the day. It hung around for over an hour before slowly clearing.

I shot OK. I was practicing shooting the Mosin using iron sights. I was able to tear up a 10″ target at 100 yards with the 80 rounds I put down range. I think it’ll work for hunting.

When I was on my way home, a buddy called and asked if I wanted to go out to his wood lot and cut up some logs. I swung by the house and picked up Junior Bear, and we went out to his farm. We spent the afternoon cutting and stacking wood. Nothing like a chain saw to work out stress.

When we got home, we finished repairing the Caravan. The new starter had come into the dealer on Friday, and once I could see what the part looked like, I was better able to visualize how it was connected to the transmission. It only took an hour to finish removing the bad starter and put in the good one. One bolt was on there so tight I had to use a cheater bar to break it loose, but no harm there.

I only had one more glitch, this one entirely of my own making. I got in a hurry when I was putting things back together and connected the battery backwards. Positive to negative, negative to positive. I blew a bunch of fuses, but thankfully, that was all. Took another hour to find them all and replace them. Never said I was bright……

So, drove the truck, shot the gun, used a chainsaw, and fixed a car. Yes, truly, I felt like a man.

Now I’m going to go do some laundry and then I may make some bottles.

Yesterday morning Girlie Bear and I got into the van to get to school and work. When I turned the key the lights came on, the radio started playing, but no cranking. After repeated attempts with no luck, I figured out that a relay was clicking over under the hood, and I could hear the starter whirring. But no cranking.

I transferred us over to the truck, and we made our way to work and school. I took the afternoon off to try to fix the problem or make arrangements at the shop.

I did some research online and in my Haynes manual, and it could have been a loose connection to the starter, a bad relay, a bad battery, or the starter itself. I checked out the cables, and they looked OK. I trust the relay because I can hear it clicking when I try to start the car. I took the battery to the parts store, and it came out of the test as a good battery. So I’m down to the starter.

According to the manual and the internet, it’s a matter of disconnecting the battery, disconnecting the starter, and then unbolting it from the engine.

Disconnecting the battery took about 2 minutes total. Bonus!

Disconnecting the starter from the electrical system took almost an hour. It was only 2 nuts to remove and one wire to pull out, but to get my big meathooks into the small space the starter is in was painful, ungainly, and maddening. Bogus!

I removed the first of 3 bolts from the starter after doing some real yoga-like contortions with my wrench. The other two bolts remain hidden by other parts of the engine, waiting for my hands and forearms to heal enough that I can try to figure out the 3d puzzle that is a Chrysler engine compartment and remove them.

I will have a replacement starter tomorrow morning. I will probably wait until Saturday to try again.

But I have made a decision. It will be a cold day in hades before I purchase another Chrysler product. I loved my first Chrysler, a Dodge Shadow. It was a crackerbox, but it was comfortable, got good gas mileage, and was really reliable.

When I finally gave in and got something else, I stayed with Chrysler and got a used Sebring. That car lasted 18 months, and then its transmission broke going 70 miles an hour on the freeway at 10 PM on a Friday.

I had been considering getting another car anyway, as this car wasn’t as comfortable as I thought it was. I didn’t think anything bad about the car, because it was used, and I didn’t know how hard the previous owner had driven it.

So I got the Caravan. And it’s a nice, comfortable daddymobile. I’ve had it almost 3 years. It’s on its second transmission, has blown almost every lightbulb in the car, and has started getting gas mileage in the F250 range.

The only reason that I pause before dumping this van and getting a Ford or something is because it’s almost paid off, and I’m looking forward to not having a car payment for a while.

This is not a complaint about the people I have worked with at Chrysler. Between us, the Irish Woman and I have bought 5 cars from the same salesman at our dealership. I also really like the people I’ve worked with in the dealership like the mechanics and technicians.

But good customer service doesn’t make up for the continual need for me to maintain this heap. And when I do work on it, the unreasonably tight quarters of the engine compartment make what should be a 20 minute job into a multiday exercise in knuckle busting. No amount of styling or good service makes up for that.

Just saw this on Cnet. Basically, a short lived MMORPG is being used to discuss possible solutions to food and energy shortages, massive disease outbreaks, and major social problems such as refugees. At first glance, it looks like http://folding.stanford.edu/, but using actual people to find answers instead of computers.

Basically, a problem is posited, and lots and lots of people put together proposals on how to deal with the problem.

Kind of like my staff meetings, but in this instance, something interesting is coming out of it.

OK, full disclosure. I used to be an instructor at the MI Schoolhouse, of which the 304th MI BN is a part. I’ve seen a lot of articles like this over the years. They’re normally done by junior officers, usually students, and are more of a “what if” scenario than anything else.

This article follows that pattern. My guess is that some young lieutenant or captain wrote this as part of a class, and it got published in the battalion newsletter. It doesn’t mean that the MI as a whole believes that Al Qaeda is using Twitter and camera phones to carry out attacks. It means that some bright young officer was able to do some research and figure out how these tools could be used.

The author raises some good points, specifically that tools that we use in our daily lives can be used by bad guys to do bad things. Camera phones,GPS, microblogging tools, and Internet chat can all be used to find targets, recon them, and then control an attack. Heck, I’ve used the camera and GPS in my iPhone to scout my deer hunting areas, and I’ve chatted from the field with my buddies when I have a 3G signal.

As the author notes, Twitter has already been used by protesters at the RNC in Minneapolis to spread information. The article also makes a good point that microblogging by military personnel can be detrimental to OPSEC.

Hopefully, this article will be used to raise awareness and not create hysteria or over-reaction, either in the public, political, or military spheres.

This caught my eye. Looks like the Air Force did a Map Exercise using China as the Red Force. They were trying to forecast what air power they would need in order to fight a conflict in the Pacific Rim with a near equal opponent.

A lot of the strategies that they are proposing seem oddly familiar. Things like dispersion, forward staging of repair and supply units, communications, and mid-air refueling are big on their list of things they want.

I’m not a Pac Rim guy. I was an Eastern Europe/Russia guy. But these things they are saying for are the same things they wanted when I was a kid living next to a SAC base in the Dakota’s.

Their suggestion that we get basing and transit rights in Japan and South Korea may be problematic. We are slowly drawing down our environments in those countries, and they are integrating themselves economically and socially with the rest of the Pac Rim, including China. In the event of a crisis, I’m not sure we could rely on these two countries to not do the calculus and see that China could do a lot more damage to them than a loss of our good graces could do. And there’s a precedent in the Iraq War. Turkey refused to allow our troops to cross their territory to get to Northern Iraq, and to my knowledge there haven’t been any repercussions. We need to have back up plans to project air, naval, and land power into the Pac Rim in the event that one or both of these important allies go cold on us.

We no longer keep B-52’s and B-1’s doing circuits on a 24×7 basis, but I don’t think that’s a permanent situation. China is going to be a major competitor to us for the foreseeable future, and I don’t see that relationship as friendly in the long term. Even if the communist government was to disappear tomorrow, the issues that force China to look for more land and resources are still there.

I’d suggest that we beef up our basing in Guam, and do something that draws a very bright line in the sand with Taiwan. Something on the order of recognition of that country and basing of Air Force and Navy units there.

Well, I got a lot done over the weekend, but not quite all of the work I had planned.

Saturday I got to sleep in until almost 9, and the Irish Woman had a hot breakfast waiting for me. Kinda nice. We spent the rest of the afternoon doing some house cleaning stuff, and then we went to the Halloween Party.

Baby Bear was as cute as expected in his Yoda costume, and we got to see a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen in quite a while.

Sunday I did a lot of the outside work. The gutters got cleaned, and I cleaned the chimney. Now I understand why a good chimney sweep is so expensive. What a nasty job!

Junior Bear continued his labors against the leaves from our maple trees. He’s kept his head above water this year, and he should be done in the next couple of weeks.

It got COLD last night, so I may be having our first fire of the year tonight.

No hunting this weekend, and I will probably go to Knob Creek this weekend to get practice in with the Mosin before gun season starts next weekend. This fall is just flying by.