Blurble blurble…. and much more blurble

I felt compelled to post some blurble as it’s been a few days ….

I noticed how this Memorial Day holiday has now become a work day (I’m back in California briefly to fix visa screw up). Whatever happened to the parades and picnics on this day for remembrance? Next will be Labor Day, then Independence Day…. I guess corporate profit continues to win the day. The glut of patriotic war movies, celebrating (hm, glorifying) America’s finer moments is great for the testosterone and a salve for the on-going disaster happening in the Middle East. From across the Pacific, it’s hard not to wonder how more fucked up Iraq can be. How’s this for an SAT analogy question: Vietnam:1969 ; Iraq:2004. Hey, if the US can really withdraw after June 30th, then I’ll eat my words.

Is there any more proof needed that it’s the oil stupid? In the past few weeks, there’s been a slew of articles posted about the “oil situation”. Starting with Royal Dutch/Shell’s scandal where the company systematically overstated its oil reserves (gee, where have we heard this one before…Enron? Tyco? Worldcom-MCI?), IRAQ, record gasoline prices, IRAQ, OPEC, Saudi Arabia, IRAQ, Qatar decline oil production problems, China’s overheating economy, more Saudi Arabia (oops! Al-Qaeda), geez, did I mention IRAQ boys and girls? The real kicker though comes from all the recent news articles and commentaries about Hubbert’s Peak which states that oil production will decline rapidly after 2010. NY Press chimes in. Why is it always the older guys who come up with the good stuff? YC’s (borrowed) axiom of life — What’s old is new; what’s new is old.

In 1956, M. King Hubbert, an American geophysicist working at the Shell Oil research laboratory in Houston, came up with a startling prediction: Oil production in the United States would peak in the early 1970s, signaling the beginning of an irreversible decline in the domestic output of crude petroleum. This event would be merely the precursor of a peaking out of oil production on a global scale, signaling the onset of the end of the Age of Oil.

Almost every energy expert on earth rejected this thesis out of hand — until the early 1970s when, indeed, exactly that happened. Output of crude oil in this country peaked in the year 1970, and it has been falling ever since.

{…}

These scientists [Kenneth. S. Deffeyes and David Goldstein] have applied the same methodology developed by Hubbert in his analysis of the outlook for American crude oil output to world oil production. They have come to the conclusion that global output of crude oil now also is on the verge of peaking out and that when this happens, contrary to all expectations, the amount of crude of oil flowing into the world market will most probably begin fall by somewhere between 5 and 10 percent annually.

CBS Marketwatch’s Paul Erdman had an excellent analysis“Why the coming oil crisis will last”.

Guess good ol’ Hubbert gets the last laugh huh?

[Note: for the sake of fairness, see National Geographic’s contrarian article.]

OTOH, am I giving the US gov’t too much credit by saying that they knew this and so therefore manufactured a reason to invade a sovereign country on the pretext of “peace”? Hm, where have I heard this one before? US foreign policy in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere in the 19th and 20th centuries perhaps is a good start.

Oh right, Halliburton.

[Major mental mind-warp]

My on-going education continues rather frenetically in Taipei. To me, Scott Adams is brilliant, a present day Mark Twain. Dilbert’s May 20 cartoon is just side-splitting hilarious; cementing in my mind Adam’s genius in understanding the modern (and universal) work place and the human capabilities of stupidity.

=YC

0 thoughts on “Blurble blurble…. and much more blurble”

  1. Re: YC on Memorial Day –

    Well, I thought that we on the east coast still look at Memorial Day as a three-day-weekend rather (or, at least, as a civil servant, I will treasure the fact that government offices were closed), but I did notice that there seemed more genuine gestures about honoring the dead who sacrificed for the country – the very meaning of Memorial Day (of course, I think 9/11/01 probably changed a lot for people around here, including seeing more meaning in something like Memorial Day, and this year’s Memorial Day was just a week away from the 60th anniversary of D-Day and coincided with the opening of the WWII Memorial in DC). The movie industry is still making it big – but the way they keep pushing back the release of blockbusters earlier and earlier kind of puts less meaning to the idea of the unofficial start of summer (uh, no, I could have sworn May 1 was spring, even if “Troy” got released real early for a blockbuster).

    Re: YC’s Dilbert link – that is so funny! Yeah, I’d love to have an anti-stupidious gun to annihilate the stupidity in the world. Zap – yeah, save you/me/everyone of stupidity…. check out the warranties, though (or perhaps we can safely assume that we’re safe (because it’s devoid of… stupidity?)… 😉

  2. Oh… Really Stupid Comment on my part – I kept seeing YC’s “IRAQ” and for some reason I thought “IRAC” from bar review – issue, rule, application, and conclusion. Sick, sick, sick – I am sick. It’s been less than two years since law school, and I still ain’t recovered from bar review? Geez Louise. 😉

  3. Its a good thing that hybrids have been coming out lately, such as the Pruis from Toyota. It drives a little wierd, since you don’t hear the engine until you hit 30, and the braking takes getting used to, but for 55 mpg, it’s worth doing. How about making engines that use soybean oil?

  4. I am so gung-ho for the hybrids… and that Toyota is spearheading the charge for SUV hybrids too! There is Green in green after-all :D.

    ssw15 – you will never recover from the bar review. What I remember is TACO. If you were a Pieper student, you would know what that is :|. I think I hold the most bar exam sittings for a non-prep JD person. I’d wager I also hold the most bar exam failures as well.

    =YC

  5. Re: Remarks from Burble, Burble”…About oil? I’m amazed at that some people are still stupid enough to believe that our military presence in Iraq is based on oil. If we hadn’t gone to Iraq, what do you think would have happened? The Oil producing countries in the middle east would stop selling oil to us? We are their biggist customer. Oil sales would drop 30% and prices would fall like a rock. They would be swimming in the damned stuff!
    How can you be so ignorant as to believe that line? If you simply do not like America and want to see us crawl before our enemys, say so. You have a right to your opinion even if you do have your head up your ..s.

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