"It's The Vanishing Oil, Stupid!"

Yesterday that speaker on C-Span talked about peak oil. There were some major discoveries of oil in the ‘thirties and the ‘forties. But oil discoveries seemed to peak out in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. In 1956 a guy said that peak oil in the US would occur at 1970 and a speaker in May of 1957 said that we were in the golden age of oil, but it would be a brief one. It took a while but in retrospect we realized that 1970 was the tipping point. New discoveries of oil dropped way off by 1980 and about 1982 consumption surpassed the oil reserves of the world. The discoveries since 1980 have been very paultry. The United States has three percent of the world’s known reserves of oil but produces 8% of the oil. This means our wells are pumping the earth dry at a faster rate than in other countries. OPEC exports about the same amount of oil as it did thirty years ago, and yet the whole world consumes a whole lot more oil now. This leads to the “mountain of consumption” on his chart. We need to find ways of reducing oil consumption.

. Let’s talk about the news hour. First Lindsey Graham was up on “Meet the Press”. I wonder if he realistically thinks Social Security will adopt means testing knowing it’s his rich supporters that will suffer from that. Lindsey also wants to raise the retirement age and other stipulations for his agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The Republican consensus seems to be to raise the debt ceiling tiny increments at the time, and to extract a promise from the Administration each time it’s raised. Good luck. Then I switched to KABC where on “This Week” they were talking about the genocide in Sudan and in other places in Africa, and how the world has turned a blind eye to it all. Then I had FOX news on a while and then turned back to “Meet the Press” where they were talking about the economy. For a minute I had it on CBS. Then I went back to FOX and to ABC and then back to FOX again, the latter two having their round tables. The whole thing is that if they are going to insist on government cutback of programs, in addition to the cutbacks states have been forced to imposed, you’re going to short change Medi Cal and Medeicare as well as these Social Security cutbacks Lindsey Graham wants, and all of this will have a continued depressive effect on the economy. Also it seems the whole notion of pensions themselves is on trial. Someone on KTLK noted that soon even getting a pension from being on the job thirty years or whatever will and is becoming a thing of the past. It’s income people today can’t rely on. Some have predicted that we are likely to be startled by the turnabout in President Obama in his next State of the Union address. It is said that the president wants to cut SOME things whereas the Republicans want to cut EVERY thing. So that a LOT of cuts will be passed in any compromised legislation. Pat Buchannon said one of the best events of 2010 was the President meeting with Bill Clinton and being sold on the idea of cutting taxes for the rich. Rotsa Ruck cutting the deficit if we continue to do things like that adding 900 billion to the deficit one year. More and more the whole “meme” is permeating society on all levels that we’re all just going to have to get by with less. This means less hiring and less impulse spending, and less forward vision of revamping the country that Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhaur and Kennedy envisioned. This era could be knows as “the great styfeling of the American dream”.

Conservative’s brains are more lizard like where you have a lot of stress cortosal from war from their mothers. Liberals are born in peace, so goes the theory, where other higher centers of the brain develop. Hartman says there is a cycle of of four generation. First there is the warrier generation. They breed “the quiet builders”. They breed a fearless generation like the Hippies who experiment with protest and drugs and spirituality. The final generation is the Gorden Gecko generation that says “well that didn’t work for us” and so they abandon the spirituality of their fathers, much as Rehoboam abandoned the spirituality of King Solomon, and they say “greed is good” and their rash conduct gets us all into a war, and thus the whole cycle starts over again. That’s Hartman’s theory anyhow.

I decided it was a good day to read a little. I read chapters in “Why I am not a Christian”. Russel says that nature is boring and also that everything that can be known about nature will eventually be written down since it is a finite amount of knowledge. I strenuously disagree. He said that the Church stresses individual morality to the utter neglect of social morality and the public good. He said none of the Saints were urban planners or reformers. And that the only time when Saints get noted for human interaction it’s for killing people in holy wars. Russel said that Christ himself was against normal family affections and the church as a whole has looked upon these human ties with disdain. So much for the Mormons. Then I read from the Compassionate Buddha. What struck me this time was most of the material is actually from his own sermons. By the way, Russel had stated that Buddhism believes neither in God nor in the immortal soul. I found nothing in my readings today that would contradict this. Of course Russel gets bogged down in the same verbal logic pitfalls that Mr. Richi gets into talking about the brain as the center of thought and when it goes, all memories go. He goes further to state that even a drop of water is not immortal but can be converted by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. He spoke of a river being immortal in a sense but likened it to a “river of thought” in the human brain. He notes how the channel remains and how this channel was not created all at once but over time.