My computer ailment is acting up, but here’s some nice, fresh meat for you, my pretties, courtesy of that nice Professor Reynolds.
Aljazeera Magazine shmuck: Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower. Somehow it escapes his attention that the Arab world is far more dependent on oil even than the US. When the US develops the alternatives–and it will be the US that does it–who then will be destitute?
At Hot Air, Allah Pundit finds Ron Paul arguing that we did exactly what bin Laden wanted by going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah, it’s true. Except he wanted us to bleed to death and open the way for the Caliphate instead of kicking his ass.
ABC News quoted Durbin as saying. “The reality is that speculation is driving the price of oil up.”
It’s those predator lenders doing all the speculating, with all the money they made of all them defaulted loans. Mark my words.
Because supply never influences price. Ever. Except when the Saudis pump another million bbl a day. That’s good. Pumping a million from ANWR or oil shale, however, makes no difference at all.
Hey B Moe, did you finish off Feministe Mike with his “man, aw man, [the man] done you wrong” bullshit. I’d rather have a prostate exam than read Ms. McIntosh’s women’s studies paper. She seems like she’d be a fun date!
Do you know what happens when you cross those predatory lenders? This.
Dan,
Not a good analogy…swerving is an immediate action followed by a near immediate result.
Unfortunately, Obama is right, it will take a while, and won’t provide much short term relief.
However, the Dems said the same thing 5, 7, 10 years ago, and if we’d cracked ANWR and ND {Bakken? sp?}
then, they’d be pumping product downstream now.
Speculators speculate in both directions. Poor Fed policies, ridiculous mandates for different formulations for different regions of the country, the base laws of supply and demand, to include China, India, et al. the ethanol boondoggle; and of course, the prevention of drilling [isn’t China drilling about 50 or 60 miles offshore in the gulf?}; these are the reasons for our current mess.
Announcing drilling and starting tomorrow might have a small effect on price, but not much until supply begins to meet demand.
The real problem is is that there is no current substitute for the power generated by an internal combustion engine.
Find me a battery/hybrid/hydrogen truck that can pull a load over Loveland pass in Colorado, and then Obama might have a point.
And the government will not invent the technology with out an extremely wasteful program, requiring the confiscation of significant parts of the products of our mind and labor at the point of a gun.
Screw that; drill, and let the inventors and investors figure it out. I have complete confidence in the market.
Obama Obama 08—let Michelle pop the balloon.
Nah, I am in moderation limbo now, fuck em if they can’t take a joke.
Additionally, if you think about it, Obama is speculating on the future, guessing that the technology will come along in time to beat the downstream flow.
That’s a pretty big bet with our future.
Speculation? Yeah, Obama’s doing it.
The Dem line about caring about poor is really b.s., isn’t it?
Sgt York, it really does depend on what you consider the short term. But it is certain that if the US were aggressive about it, it would have some relatively immediate effect on speculators.
It amazes me that those who (especially now that they don’t want Iraq much covered) howl about the money poured into “Bush’s endless war” seem so sanguine about the trillions per year we pay for foreign oil.
Since when has the fact that something takes a long time to do been an argument for delaying the start of it?
Unless someone has an alternative that they can guarantee will be online in less than ten years AND have the infrastructure and availability of gas and oil, then DRILL FOR THE GOD-DAMNED OIL.
You want to work on “alternatives,” fine, do that.
You want to build nuclear reactors, yes, I agree, do that.
You want to glue solar panels to your Prius, fine, do it.
But we need the damned oil to get from A to B. Even retarded idiot Marxists realize you need to work your way through stages of civilization (even if they totally screw up the order), and we’re at the stage when we need the freaking oil to build all the cool future crap everybody wants.
At the very least, start drilling off Florida so we don’t just sit by and let China drink our milkshake.
I mean, face it: this is what our reaction has looked like.
“In the first four cases, we did not find any evidence the feet were severed,” she said.
Well, except for the fact that they apparently weren’t attached to a fucking body. Or has there been an outbreak of feral right feet in the pacific northwest? Maybe they were big feet?
They did say that they were running shoes. Maybe they were run off their feet.
Since when has the fact that something takes a long time to do been an argument for delaying the start of it?
About the same time that raising taxes on something is an incentive to lower the price, near as I can tell.
I hear Daniel Day Lewis is being considered for the lead role in “My Foot Left”.
Perhaps immediate, but not significant.
I must confess, I worked in the trading department at Mid-American. Speculators are only a small percentage of the current price rise.
Keep and eye on the daily volume of puts and calls, and their value in and out…you’ll see that there’s not a ton of difference.
It generally takes 2 and 1/2 years to crack, flow and refine the product. Remember to include infrastructure construction, the most time consuming non-governmental part of the drilling process. Roads, pipelines, refining storage and waste disposal all have to be solved.
Then the governmental part..the permitting process, by far, the most time consuming process. The quicker we streamline this process, the quicker we can get downstream.
And remember, we haven’t built a new refinery in this country in near 30 years
Respectfully,
Mike
{It amazes me that those who (especially now that they don’t want Iraq much covered) howl about the money poured into “Bush’s endless war†seem so sanguine about the trillions per year we pay for foreign oil.}
Exactly.
No war for oil? If only we’d taken Iraq’s oil…
It’s time we take the rest of Mexico and their oil. Fuck it. Give Andy Sullivan something to really bitch about!
And that is what our reaction has looked like, except that our metabolism is much slower…
B Moe: It makes “because there’s no bones in ice cream” seem like sheer genius, don’t it?
Unless you count Japanese “Raw Horseflesh” ice cream, of course.
I thought we could stop paying attention to Ron Paul now. Another wish doesn’t come true for me.
If we do that we also have to take their people. There might actually be advantages to unilaterally legalizing millions of illegal aliens that way, since we’d get their resources and be in a position to undo all the crap their country’s doing that drives them north — but the howling in the meantime, from both sides of the border and from the UN, would be something fierce.
Personally of course, I couldn’t care less about whether the world hates us for doing it. The world already hates us as if we’d already done it. Sheep, goats…
Dark post, Dan. Very dark.
Steven Den Beste did an energy source conversion analysis some years back, 2003 maybe, that plausibly demonstrated the folly in any near term ‘alternative’ energy solutions to our problem. If I remember his conclusion, it was kinda like, ‘don’t be silly, you’re gonna need oil for decades to come, there’s no physical way around it, so you better keep up your supply or prepare to see your economy tank to the level of output (in absolute terms, not per capita) of the early 20th century.’
I’m stale-posting to remind you that when you rot underwater, no “severing” is necessary to make your feet come off. The bones disarticulate in a fairly typical way and the feet tend to come away.
If you are on land on a slope, a lot of times the head comes off and rolls some distance away without help from the likes of, say, Al Quaeda.
Just thought I’d brighten your day. Habeus a nice Corpse-us
Man, scale up those oil-pooting bacteria. Wouldn’t a little home brewery be nice.
Sarah W,
RE:#25…Oh my! And “Habeus a nice Corpse-us”…wish I was that funny.
RE:#26…”a pooting home brewery” I love it.
I hope I live long enough to see the Arab nations realise just what we actualy think of them…playing nice to third world savages has been the greatest moral drain on the west and hurts us all.
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