Palin 2012!
Some “ghastly” observations regarding Hitler and his quack doctor, Dr. Morell, who may have inadvertently cost Hitler his 2,000 year Reich. It can be difficult to manage a world war when consuming large quantities of strychnine, cocaine, and bull testicles.
I hate to say it but OPEC President Mohammed bin Dhaen al-Hamli’s comments sound accurate:
“Increasingly oil markets are being driven by forces beyond OPEC’s control, such as geopolitical events and the growing influence of financial investors,” Hamli said. “We are of course concerned about the high level of oil prices.”
Until we get this whole terror thing wrapped up I don’t like believing anything said by a Democrat or anyone named Mohammed. I hate to be that way, but there ya go.
I especially think the part about the “growing influence of financial investors” is on the money. When the price at the pump for a gallon of gasoline varies independently from the widely reported on price of oil, something is out of whack. When the gasoline price movements track closer to the news cycle than they do the oil market, something is out of whack.
One thing noted by al-Hamli that both lends credence to the “growing influence of financial investors” and contradicts the rest of his theory is that OPEC members already had decided last month to increase output by 500,000 barrels a day starting Nov 1.
If I am a speculator with inside information that OPEC was going to increase oil production I would buy, pump and dump and short the futures market–if I were a rat bastard, or a beaver bastard.
Assuming optimal conditions an increase in the abundance of a commodity results in a decrease in the price as the supply and demand equation is changed. The bad news is that if an increase in supply does not lower the price then demand is not being met and the price is still below optimal, a situation that would seem to indicate further increases in production would eventually start to bring prices down.
The alternative is that the price is being run up and kept at an artificially high price by George Bush and the neo-cons and their Saudi friends to pay for the Iraq war.
It would be difficult to make a living speculating in the oil market if every available storage tank was full of oil waiting for someone to buy it. If you think of the earth as a big storage tank, that’s basically what we have.
Can we mine the moon? Should we mine the moon if we could? Are the Chinese going to mine the moon first? I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do find them to be very interesting. Even more interesting in a funny ha-ha kinda way are some the comments to this Guardian story by Andrew Smith entitled Plundering the moon.
To wit:
If i had a way i would destroy all of mankind’s ventures outside of the Earth, at least until he learns to appreciate and protect – this world. We should stay here until we prove ourselves worthy of existence by learning to live here peacefully with each other – in harmony with our environment. If we were by chance to find another biosphere, protecting this planet would become even less of a priority. I only wish that our wisdom could make the leaps and bounds that our technological ability is capable of.
And to whom do we “prove ourselves worthy of existence”, I wonder? Al Gore? The UN? This poster?
Here’s another good one. I did not know this:
The solar system is chock full of minerals and free energy; I doubt HE3 mining is on the Chinese minds. All space programmes are military in nature. That’s why the space shuttle has wings – it is the precursor to a space bomber.
Another:
Wouldn’t it be funny if the Chinese took close-up photos of the Sea of Tranquility and other US lunar landing areas and found absolutely zero evidence to prove that any Americans had ever “landed” on the moon?
And how exactly could one be sure the Chinese close-up photos were real?
This “greed” is not confined to humans. Any organism presented with an abundant food source will multply until the food source is gone. Then, most or all of them will die. For detritivores likes us the hope is that we can then find another big heap of food like the oil we are half way through eating.
That we could find it off-planet seems highly unlikely.
As nomadic creatures we’ve got used to believing that we can always move on to greener pastures.
We can’t. Our “brief opportunity” has passed.
If our “brief opportunity” has passed, why so much concern? Hmmmm? Why not just chuck it in and enjoy the party?
I look at the moon nearly every day.
It’s bad enough knowing there’s a load of human junk up there already.
Like what kind of human junk? An American flag? Typical leftist liberal who loathes the thought of any evidence of any human existence but wont go ahead and take himself out for the good of the planet. Too important to the cause, I’m sure. This is kinda like the Teddy “where’s my pants” Kennedy position on the windmills that would spoil his view of the bay.
I think this one might have been being a bit facetious:
IMHO the Moon should be an international park, open to research but not exploitation, and administered by the UN. It’s a very special and delicate place, and should be treated as such. If we want somewhere to dig up, there’s Mars.
In fairness there are some decent comments rebutting these twits but the crazies are more entertaining for the sheer asshattery of their world view:
Just another unreachable or [im]practical dream, when man on this earth has not even learned to clean his ass properly, keep this environment safe, clean and most likely to wind up like the Venus environment of sulphuric acid.
Babayaba is a committed luddite and has several entries in the sage. here’s one of his better efforts:
The Moon may be “dead as a doornail” but it is still a fragile environment. How long will the marks of even just the US Moon missions persist?
It’s a terrible indictment of our culture that it produces people who have no feeling that the Moon could be anything other than another handy lump of exploitable rock.
The moon is an inseparable part of the Earth and has been sacred to humans for thousands of years.
Why do we think we, homo oily, in our tiny blip of civilisation, have the right to despoil her?
That’s right Baba, we don’t just pillage, we rape and pillage. Finally I’ll end with one or two comments that I liked:
[The moon] is one of a squillion chunks of lifeless rock floating about the universe. The really unique things are the clever monkeys on the planet which it orbits. They are the ones who went from shit-throwing, berry-eating primates to really smart creatures with broadband and electric guitars in the blinking of a cosmic eye. They’re the ones who deserve all the benefits which can be derived from strip mining the moon. Pass me my spacesuit and pickaxe – I’m off to fulfil the destiny of my species: more things and more power!
and:
I am genuinely puzzled here. I looked at this article title and thought ‘What possible argument is there against exploiting the moon’s resources?’ I was actually fascinated to see what was put forward. As far as I can see there is absolutely no argument put forward, just a few sentimental phrases.
And as for the posts, they just seem to demonstrate a self-loathing for humanity.
I am puzzled that this article was published at all. It has nothing to say.
Since I just blogged about the comments I guess I would agree.
You know what they say about a fool and his money.
Every successful society has devised ways of separating incompetent or systematically unlucky people from the control of valuable resources.
I certainly don’t wholly disagree with the guy, but Baden sure is a cold-hearted bastard:
I join other tender hearts and empathize with their individual plight.
Despite our sympathy for individuals, and in the spirit of tough love for them and for the nation, we should cherish, though not celebrate, these failures at the national level. Here’s why failure is important.
Basically because people must be punished for their folly, according to John Baden.
more…
you have to register to leave comments at TCS and I haven’t changed my policy yet on registering to read the paper in the morning. So I’ll further opine here.
The main problem I can see is that our very successful society is very good at separating the systematically unlucky from their resources. The fault lies in to whom the resources are given once separated.
The Apple iPhone could be ten times better than it actually is and I wouldn’t have one just because I don’t like the way Apple operates.
If I had a few million dollars laying around here’s one of the things I’d do:
I would set up a news bureau in Washington, DC and New York City, New York and let citizen journalists come serve as bureau reporters for a week or two at a time up to a month even. However long they can afford to take off from their job to play reporter. It would be like a vacation.
The citizen journalists would have to be qualified to some degree but not as a reporter. Just as a writer who can ask questions and report in an interesting way what they found out. Press credentials would be provided for access to all kinds of venues– political, entertainment, health and science, etc., whatever interests the reporter. Stories filed with the bureau would be put on the wire and published on the web. All proceeds go back into providing a better bureau.
I’d imagine blogger-types would be the biggest target market for such a “vacation.” I would pay for the whole operation as a philanthropist, but it could probably make a ton of money.
If anybody with a few million dollars laying around (Trump, are you still reading my blog?) reads this and thinks it’s a good idea, I know the perfect guy to run the operation.
I guess the Edwards campaign got their way
more…
If someone gets tired of Google’s heavy-handedness and moves to one of the many other video streaming services and the YouTube service is a distant also ran in the arena, will the video still have a relevant showing in Google’s search pages? Could Google damage it’s integrity enough with YouTube censorship to do serious damage to it’s primary business of providing fast, accurate searches?
If I spend valuable time producing and publishing a story only to have my streaming video service provider, in the above case Google under the YouTube brand, only to find it’s been pulled by the provider for any reason other than clear copyright infringement, I will not be inclined to waste my time using their service in the future.
Google needs to start telling the constant complainers and whiners, like John Edwards and his sniveling campaign, who try to stifle the free-flow of information to take it to court.
Anti-war skids at the boxoffice, despite all-star, award-whining casts:
It doesn’t matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall’s surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films.
Both “In the Valley of Elah” and, more recently, “Rendition” drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn’t bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s wider war on terror.
<* snip *>
Beyond the fiction features, the anti-Iraq war documentary “No End in Sight” (box office: $1.4 million) couldn’t capture the indie crowd, beating a swift retreat to DVD next Tuesday despite glowing reviews.
Makes me happy. Couldn’t happen to a better group of people. I was hoping the whole slew of anti-American flicks would fall flat on their faces for their fecal fecundity. Wasn’t optimistic, but there is a glimmer:
A film that took a principled stand, particularly against terrorism, might fare better with audiences, Mr. Gray says.
Films with bold perspectives also spark op-ed flurries which can lead to more ticket buyers, says Dan Vancini, movies editor with Amazon.com.
“Then, you’ll get your audience in who already resonates with the message,” Mr. Vancini says, though he adds such free publicity isn’t always a good thing.
The problem is that no one resonates with a message of retreat and surrender, the lefties just hate Bush because he is threat to free and easy abortions.
Instead of seeing a glass as half-full or half-empty, some people always see a broken glass that can cut your lip. In an AP story about how mankind is killing off 1/3 of all apes, monkeys and other primates:
Six species are in the report for the first time, including a recently discovered Indonesian tarsier that has yet to be formally named and the kipunji from Tanzania, which was discovered in 2003.
Some of the new species we discover are endangered from the get go,” Mittermeier said. “If you find a new species and it’s living in an area heavily impacted by habitat destruction and hunting, you recognize it’s in trouble.”
Wouldn’t this guy be fun a party?
I’m no biologist or conservation expert but common sense leads me to at least consider the possibility that the Indonesian tarsier is a new species. I’ve done a little research on this topic before and have been meaning to do a piece on it, maybe do some actual counting. There are I think more species being found than are going extinct. One could argue that all our efforts to protect and save a species from extinction could be preventing a even-more-wonderful new species from evolving.
Decide for yourself:
Google news ==> New Species found
Google news ==> Recent extinctions
Google news ==> Recently Extinct
Of course I am a day or so behind, as usual, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to re-post a popular article from the past. I was reminded of it by a piece over at Dr. Helen’s about what to do with spare change and the different aspects of spending same.
My take:
The funny thing about loose change, put it in a jar at the end of every day and before you know it, in about 10 years or so, you’ll be surprised to find you have accumulated several thousand dollars. If one already does this, they already know that the overall process has to be managed two to three times a year. Here are some tips from an old hand. This only applies if you have enough sense to pick up your change from off the floor.
- Try to kick the pennies out as much as you can during the day, they are labor intensive to process and storage cost to value ratio is very high. Pennies are break even at best, and likely create a loss.
- Spend the pennies when you can. Avoid kicking in the 2 or 3 pennies to the penny cup on small purchases. That is 3% of your dollar on a 97 cent fountain drink. When excessive pennies accumulate during the day, upgrade your value by exchanging for nickels and dimes. Put any leftovers in the penny cup by the cashier at the end of the day, up to four. (Your nuts if you dont think these clerks are rolling up a pack or two of cigarettes everyday. )
- Keep any wheat back pennies, they may be valuable.
- Nickels are damn close to pennies. However, never pass up a nickel. Although bulky to store, you know the saying about being penny wise.
- Don’t take any wooden nickels.
- Dimes are cool. Nice to spend by the roll and they dont bulk down the pocket. Each one, although smaller than the lowly penny, holds ten times the value. Storage space required per unit value is minimum.
- Quarters. The mother load. Bulky and use lots of storage, but they are valuable. Hoard as many as you can.
- Keep all bi-centenial quarters seperate; treat as collectible. (If damaged or really worn, roll it.)
- Fifty cent pieces and dollar pieces keep seperate. Use the dollar pieces on the toll way if you dont have enough sense to use a toll pass. I hardly ever see fifty cent pieces so they must be rare, treat them as collectibles until further notice.
- Buy a good sorter. The cheap ones get jammed a lot and are not good for production work. If you have enough discipline to drop your change in the sorter every day, a cheap sorter might suffice. If you can swing it, get a sorter that you can insert the rolls in before the cylinder fills. Saves an irritating step in the process.
Thats about it. Need to go wash the truck? Easy. Just grab a roll of quarters. Kids always raise hell at the local Mexican food restaurant for the gumball machines? No problem. Have a roll of quarters ready and smoke that last butt in peace.
This system works for paper money too. And cars.
So the next time someone says, “Hey Buddy, can you spare some change?” Tell them no.
