curious cat

Nationalizing Oil: Well-Intentioned, But Wrong

chubbster, you are right. the left continues to elect touchy feely liberals who feel our pain and want to put us out of our misery. frankly, i can't say i blame them. republicans had the greatest opportunity to fix our economy, to balance our books and postpone the left's lunacy for fifty years. instead, they took us to war.

that wouldn't have been so bad either, but they screwed that war up. we have air superiority and dominion over the skys everywhere. why do we put our soldiers at risk? why do we get involved in ground wars? it is financially impossible to project power across the globe. vietnam taught us that.

simply bomb hussein and drop leaflets that the bombs will stop for 24 hours until we hear that hussein is gone or opened his country to nuclear inspection or whatever you want. once you have convinced one country that you mean business, you will have no trouble from iran or north korea.

or, republicans could have gotten together with china and russia, which both finally headed into capitalism and agreed on a policy that would support all three, instead of allowing our country to be out capitalized by them. china and russia were broke and backward. thanks to our tax dollars being misspent and our energy dollars given to them, they are now able to buy us.

much as you hate the democrats, at least they would waste our money on us. ok, not the working part of us, but at least the poor part of us. then those people could continue to go to the 99 cent store or walmart and i could buy stock and be rich, but noooooo....

Oil Will Peak at $150-200 - Barron's Interview

soilent breed, soilent greed, soilent green. don't sweat it, rbbartho. populations reach critical mass in countries and people die, either through war, famine, disease or gov't dictates.

this grim aspect of growth is broken whenever some really smart persons discover methods to produce superfoods (like bread), refrigeration (tons of the world's food spoils before it can be eaten), storage (tons of food are consumed by pests and rodents), or crop yield improvements (through genetic manipulation, fertilization, pest controls and water or soil improvements).

those discoveries make it possible for the population bubble to expand just when it seems the world has reached its tolerance level and during the next cycle more people survive. of course, that also means that more people die when we reach the upper support level of the next incremental improvement. never-the-less, the incentive for improvements comes from necessity, the mother of all invention. we would still be living in villages, if the process were interrupted. if kings had forced their peasants to stop breeding, progress would have been halted. we have to look at the bigger picture.

someday, we will send people to the stars. when we get tired of being congested, here on earth, we'll develop a way to escape and seed the universe. that is our mandate. grow or die. you can't mourn the ones who die in the process from hunger, disease or war. their existence serves a higher purpose and ultimately, they will be so small in number when you compare them to the countless people who will be able to enjoy other planets because of their sacrifice.

feel free to contribute by buying refrigeration stocks, fertilizer stocks, seed stocks or tech stocks. if you are really very smart, maybe you could work on the next generation of solutions yourself. we have to acknowlege that the "just say no" programs are insufficient. our history suggests that adversity is necessary to prod mankind forward. sometimes, that's a nagging spouse. sometimes, it's the perception that armegeddon is just around the corner.

Peak Oil, Gold and the U.S. Dollar

man, if there ever was a contrary indicator for the price of gold and commodities,... try checking out historical movements in these things and be amazed at the cyclicality. sure it looks like the end of the world is near, but it always looks that way to people living in darkness and on the edge. you will eventually see that the earth is round, that you can continue going forward and that our way of life is not the only way of life.