Letters to the Editor
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gettin' hosed
Bend over America, the beat goes on. Jimmy Carter saw this coming in 1978 and created an agency to get us off oil for strategic and environmental reasons. Reagan arrived and immediately pulled the plug on Carter's idea. And the commercial media rolled over like a tired whore. Time to wake up, folks.
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gettin' hosed
Bend over America, the beat goes on. Jimmy Carter saw this coming in 1978 and created an agency to get us off oil for strategic and environmental reasons. Reagan arrived and immediately pulled the plug on Carter's idea. And the commercial media rolled over like a tired whore. Time to wake up, folks.
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gettin' hosed
Bend over America, the beat goes on. Jimmy Carter saw this coming in 1978 and created an agency to get us off oil for strategic and environmental reasons. Reagan arrived and immediately pulled the plug on Carter's idea. And the commercial media rolled over like a tired whore. Time to wake up, folks.
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Cars are to Republicans as Women's Bodies are to Democrats
There is a huge looming gas crisis, but we won't really do anything about gas guzzlers. Here's why: When it comes to one's freedom to burn gas, most Republicans see cars much as most Democrats see woman's bodies. This attitude could be captured through the following slogans:
-Keep your hands off my vehicle. It's MY car.
-My right to choose whether to drive and WHAT to drive.
-It's not the government's business how I choose to be pleasured in the privacy of my own vehicle.
-The decision of how huge a vehicle to drive is between a person and his Hummer Dealer.
[Why do they think like this? Perhaps this conspicuous consumption can best be explained by reference to Darwin's lesser known theory of selection: sexual selection. See Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind."]
All of these reasons for driving big vehicles are couched in terms of "freedom," of course, as though the wrack and ruin of the national economy is not a contending interest to one's right to drive a vehicle that gets only 9 miles per gallon when tested under ideal road conditions.
Because Reblicans have this deep emotion yearning toward large vehicles, it will be impossible for this administration to ever consider implementing a responsible energy policy.
www.dangerousintersection.org
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Inflation
Seventy-three-dollar-a-barrel oil and $3-a-gallon gasoline augur the long-feared return of a president's worst economic enemy: inflation.
Most people believe this, and so the political peril for Bush is real (a good thing!), but in the interest of accuracy, I need to counter this point.
The reason inflation happens is when the money supply rises too fast -- and that's it. The reason the high oil/gas prices in the 1970s were associated with high inflation was because the Federal Reserve at the time responded to the economic pain of high oil prices by easing economic policies -- i.e. by increasing the money supply. That is what caused the inflation, not the oil prices themselves.
Inflation was halted when the first Fed chairman under Reagan (I forget the name) rapidly hiked interest rates, triggering the recession of the early 80s. That was painful, but it did the trick.
The Fed remembers that lesson. They are far more willing now to raise interest rates too high and cause a recession than they are to let inflation get out of control again. Because if recession hits due to high interest rates, they can just lower rates again; but if inflation hits, they would have to spawn an even worse recession to get out of it.
So the actual chances of a return of high inflation are virtually nil.
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3-bucks a gallon? That's nothing.
Great column Mr. Leonard. You get my vote.
Would that the NY Times, Washington Post, and
LA Times published something similar...until this
stuff gets out into mainstream media, it's nowhere.
My main point..this time of peak-oil production is
bound to be bumpy..we'll have a correction in oil prices here, most likely, but it won't be much of a correction, and if any number of Bad Things happen instead, the sky's the limit for oil and gasoline prices. And the trend, of course, the trend is most definitely not our friend, in this instance, unless you're investing regularly in some nice, solid energy funds...
(Let's not even think about the consequences of falling off the natural gas cliff. Coming to an electrical generating plant near you before too long. Rolling blackouts at the very least in major metro areas. I rather not even talk about it, thanks. I've been pricing complete domestic solar packages. You should too.)
People think 3 bucks a gallon for gasoline is high? Hah. It's not. It's nothing. We're chewing through millions of years of ancient sunshine in a comparative heartbeat. People have no idea what they're doing.
But Bush, Cheney, and the boys do. They know perfectly well what they're doing, and they'll fade quietly away when their terms are up, secure in the knowledge that they made more than enough money to hire a nice private army when the mob comes calling on them... or something of the sort, anyway.
3-bucks-a-gallon for gas? That's so incredibly cheap, it's a joke. Now. 50 bucks a gallon. that's more like it. And we'll see it, in our lifetimes. Bet on it. Gas will be for the rich only, then.
The american public thinks gas prices are high now? They have no idea. It's sad really, how unrelievedly stupid the public is. It has been ever thus, but this basic fact never ceases to amaze, you know? Socrates wrote about it. Marcus Aurelius did too. Everyone has. Yet. Nothing changes. Nothing. The public, the *voters* the *people* remain as bottomlessly ignorant, stupid, and shallow as they have ever been.
What do we have to look forward to? See www.dieoff.org The numbers, graphs, and charts, are clear enough.
Sorry. I'm having a cynical day.
Chas
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Campaign Slogans
Great slogan ideas, Ramon.
Bush's Slogan:
>Bend over America!
Opposition Slogan:
>Time to Wake Up!
The Winner: PT Barnum.
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Think back... '73 Mideast war... with whom did we side..?
Any recognition..? Connecting any dots..? No?
Let's go back further... '47... did we have *any* enemies in the Mideast..? No?
Explain to me how an oil-dependent country chooses a path that results in its economy being negatively affected... what has I$rael *ever* done for the US?
Machine-gunning US sailors trying to board life rafts does NOT count!