Letters to the Editor
aveutter
Published Letters: 270 Editor's Choice: 40
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Peak Oil, or Peak Fiat Currency
[Read the article: The missing link in Mexico's declining oil production]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While crude oil prices are rising nominally, in real terms they continue to decline. Against a backdrop of central banks manipulating their currency, causing monetary inflation, and falling commodity prices, while deflation takes hold in real terms, the tendency is to withhold supply. Oil grows more dear, which is a better word than cheap, while the money continues to expand. Hyperinflation is just around the corner, why sell your product at deflationary fire sale prices.
In one recent month the producers went net long in Copper, which is almost unheard of. Producers short the commodity to protect themselves from a drop in prices, but futures contracts contain the right to delivery. Even if the price falls, you keep your own product.
Peak oil is a huge fraud, prepetrated for reasons of national self interest, against the cunning and self interested Central Bankers of the major industrial countries. One huge fraud deserves another. At the extreme Americans can expect another oil embargo, who says history doesn't repeat itself. Only history tells us that was OPEC's way of playing politics with oil, when logic tells us that oil should be a bit more scarce, and the price should be rising not only in nominal terms, but in real terms as well.
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Condi doesn't need to be elected
[Read the article: All aboard the Condi Mobile!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]According to the rules of succession she only needs to be confirmed by a simple majority in the House and Senate. For that to happen Bush needs to fire Cheney, and hire Condi. I mean that's not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, they thought the VP was a separate office. Recall that until recently the Republicans didn't have to announce the name of the VP until after their primary.
If the Congress balks at appointing Condi, then Bush takes it to SCOTUS for a rubberstamping. She serves out his term, after he artfully resigns, the election is called off because of a major terrorist event, and you're looking at that face for six years, easily.
Americans don't want to believe it, but the next President will probably be worse than Bush.
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re: dinosaur and dinosaur ?
[Read the article: Now romancer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]dinosaurs right, this stuff is all about the past, the effects of technology are the past, the result, although gibson makes a good point about technology annointing itself. henry ford started making cars when there were no roads. if people would have gotten together and said, hey wait a minute, we're not ready for this, we could have saved a lot of trouble. but that's all bridges over the water, (which is the role of technology always, break something and then ride to the rescue by fixing it with more technology).
i think its possible technology will enable us to control the world, but then i see men in night goggles hooked up to drones twenty thousand feet in the air looking at the ground with telescopic lenses for pockets of evil directed by a President who just had his colon checked for specks of cancer, in his otherwise healthy body ( a metaphor for the nation he shephards).
the speaker of the house said she was in favor of expanding healthcare. neither she, nor the President understand, thats' not the problem, people getting sick is the problem.
bird flu and aids and bin laden haven't gotten out of hand in a while, thanks to this web of technology, yawn, but we are still an unhealthy culture which is what happens when the shock of new technology wears off. consider the epidemic of diabetes and autism, diseases formerly unknown to any degree, and something from which the President suffers, at least metaphorically.
the big problem being that once the growth of technology slows, the process is less able to react to it's own mistakes. much like an overzealous stock market, we are facing a technology crash, and on the downside of the curve things move much slower. there may be a thousand years of rethinking these things, sorting them out. it will be long, and very discouraging time.
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Bush Preempts his Democratic Successor
[Read the article: Bush's tangled arms deal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A coordinated military withdrawal, and a new round of arms sales, makes a lot of sense. I feel sure this is what the Democrats would have done, in 2008 when they retook the White House. The larger plan would be to rely on diplomacy, and MAD, mutually assured destruction, which on the conventional level means everyone is equally well prepared to defend themselves.
There is a second important reason to sell military hardware to our creditors, the U.S. dollar is in real danger of becoming a worthless fiat currency. The problem is not the trade balance, its what our creditors are allowed to buy with those dollars. We blocked the port deal with Dubai, the sale of UnoCal to the Chinese, and previously the Saudi Arms deal.
In this global economy the arms trade is fungible, Hugo Chavez cut a deal with China for military hardware. Previous more nimble Presidents would have recognized the benefits of selling weapons to Venezuela, while stoking the rhetoric, and maintaining the critical advantage in state of the art technology. One way of recouping some of the inflated oil prices third world dictators charge us, is to sell them some overpriced military equipment. And our MIC knows all about overpriced, underperforming military hardware..
When Israel failed to deliver in the Lebanon campaign the blush was off the rose. Now it makes sense to arm everyone in the region, create a mini cold war standoff, and let the parties try negotiation. Israel was never going to negotiate in good faith as long as they had military superiority.
War with Iran? More likely Bush will use the Kerry option, and give them nuclear material in exchange for the fissionable byproduct. That was the North Korea solution, and it required a long American presence along the DMZ. That's the long term plan, and Democrats will probably continue it in some form or another.