so long and thanks for all the oil

SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE OIL

I don't know what but something has gone wrong with the gadget that links Amazon products to this blog.  Until it is fixed, I've added a daily links page to my web page.  I'll give you the link and when you are ready to buy from Amazon please go through that page first.  Just like if you'd gone through a link in this article, I'll get credit for your purchase.  You pay no extra, I get paid from commission to keep writing.  Here's today's link:
http://www.bisonpress.com/dailylink030511.html
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I got the book "Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat" by Creekmore in the mail Friday.  I'll be posting a review of it this coming Tuesday.
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Working at the food bank you get to know a lot of homeless guys ( and a few gals- who, let me tell you, are in general a heck of a lot more loopy than the guys ) who, because they secretly envy my hair, which I know because whenever they shave theirs off once a year make sure to show me that horror show, usually are pretty friendly and want to share the 411 with me ( I like most of them, for the most part good people that just have a few personality quirks ). It’s actually quite interesting, what with drunken fights over the last scavenged wood pallet or the crazy bastard that lines the perimeter of his tent with his own feces to keep the others away from his stuff. A few months ago they were all in a lather over camp raids. It turned out some bozo in the sheriffs office was bucking for promotion and thought this was a good way to beef up his personnel file. The guys kept getting arrested for trespassing and fined. Well, as anybody that’s talked to the homeless more than five minutes knows, the whole point for living that lifestyle is to be able to do absolutely nothing. Lazy do-nothing teenagers can’t hold a candle to these guys. Who actually thought they were going to get a job to pay a fine? The alternative, being put into jail, was so much more appealing. Especially in winter when they got out of the cold and got fed three times a day ( we only feed them stale donuts in the morning and a big lunch- and only a few eat lunch since you have to volunteer an hour to get a lunch ticket ). It didn’t take long for the county to figure out all these guys WANTED to get arrested. After the whole fiasco started costing the idiots real money the raids stopped. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Of course I wouldn’t advise using this strategy unless you stop bathing so you can’t smell these guys in a small cell. My unwashed ass smells better.

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With homage to Douglas Adams, today’s article. Did any of us expect the middle east uprising? The conventional wisdom was that we bribed dictators to keep their restless natives in line and sell us their commodities cheap. This is a lot cheaper than actually occupying the place and trying to keep the slaves working. Let the native lord do the dirty work, pile his Swiss bank account high with worthless printing press dollars, get taxpayer subsidized raw materials. Places like Libya had local strongmen in power for the last fifty years or so and it worked just fine. It worked in the past, so we all just assumed it would keep working. Until it didn’t, for whatever reason. Likewise, the conventional wisdom is that the superpowers are going to kiss sheik ass to get Most Favored Industrial Nation status and get affordable oil. But let me ask an interesting question ( well, I find it interesting even if you don’t ). What if it was in someone’s interests to deny the world Saudi/middle east oil rather than try to fight over its control? I said that the middle east uprisings looked a bit contrived. After all, Twitter wasn’t the first time rebels could communicate. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the media claimed that the fax machine was somehow responsible. Or maybe it was the video tape. Some such damn thing. And of course it all made sense since we didn’t want to question our good fortune. But, really, come on! Are we so in awe of technology we are granting it magical powers? I know a lot of folks are furiously intoning the Great God Techno for help when the oil runs out ( hell, everyone knows that if we could just drill deeper into the gooey liquid center of the earth we could find unlimited oil ). I can holler at Karma all day long, listing my grievances until I’m blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean the ex-wife has been hit by a truck yet.

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Technology didn’t suddenly make it possible for rebellion ( go back forty years- Jim Morrison was screaming “they got the guns but we got the numbers” ). Something might very well be going on behind the scenes. Someone wants the oil to stop flowing ( loyal minion thanks for “the spice must flow” ). If it isn’t us, and I can’t imagine why it would benefit the bankers that require next to free energy for growth for interest payments, who could it be? China? At first glance this might seem stupid. China is importing everything furiously. They are addicted to growth through manufacturing. But… What if they saw the inevitable writing on the chalkboard, knew the pain was coming, and took matters into their own hands to make the best of it. The US can’t begin to think outside the box of unlimited flowing oil. Everything depends on it. China seems to be in the same boat, but that would be ignoring history. The US was born and raised on energy surplus. Unlimited forest and fertile ground, unlimited coal, unlimited oil. Four hundred years of unlimited resources. China has thousands of years experience living within their means ( they are no where near perfect, plenty of famines and busts, but energy scarcity is their norm whereas ours is only surplus ). If they know that we will get pretty damn stupid trying to control “our” oil ( see the last article on nuclear weapon use ), what is a great way to take our threat off the board? Take away what we are fighting for. Nuke the Saudi oil refineries and major production areas. Their newest and bestest buddies the Russians can supply old “lost” nukes to be used. Or the same type of Russian missiles sold to Iran can be used with a built in scapegoat. There doesn’t have to be a traceable ICBM trajectory to point the finger at the Chinese. Hell, a sub might surface near an Iranian coastal navy vessel, pop off a missile, and go back home undetected. I’m not in naval intelligence, the details aren’t that important. The general idea is.

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If the Russians and Chinese just sit back and hope the Americans don’t crisp the planet in a major nuclear exchange, they are going to end up with the crap end of the stick. It has got to make much more sense to them to be preemptive. Perhaps plan A is mass unrest of the natives. Plan B might be to take Saudi oil out of the equation. They can make due with less oil. We can’t.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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