Oil!

Almost two years without updates. I've been slackin'.

Welcome to those of you who came to visit the online precalculus class at Coastline!

Okay, my last post mentioned the price of oil at over $70/barrell. Today, the price of oil settled at a little over $91/barrell. I just bought gas for $2.83/gallon down the street from my house. The average price is $3.14 according to this site. Two years ago, the average price of a gallon of gas was $3.06 according to the same site. Lucky for us, the cost differences between crude oil and finished product have been disproportionate.

Maybe that makes sense. I dunno. It's been a long day.

Three Things About Iran

1) Oil closed above $70 a barrel today. The two most-cited reasons being supply disruptions in Nigeria and diplomatic tension between Western nations and Iran.

2) Iran is the fourth largest (as of 2004, since 2005 numbers haven't been crunched yet) exporter of oil in the world.
3) Iran has been deliberately pronouncing its intentions lately:
        a) Exercises in the Gulf showcasing advanced weaponry - super fast torpedoes and stealth missiles
        b) Development of nuclear program and successful uranium enrichment
        c) Pronouncement of extreme hatred of Israel and warning of the nation's impending annihilation
Which has led to increased fears regarding Iran in the West and subsequent increases in world oil prices.

Who's profiting from global fears? Is Iran practicing a sort of economic terrorism? Is oil our Kryptonite?

Reflections of Nixon/Iran Rattles its Saber, Again

It's like Nixon, but different.

News reports today are awash in the latest political scandal to plague the Bush administration, that Bush approved the release of National Intelligence information to the New York Times. Wow. It just keeps getting better and better. No White House has been more reviled and plagued with controversy since Nixon. It will be interesting to see how history textbooks will describe the Bush legacy. I'm predicting respectful with no/slight hint of criticism. Textbooks are meant to be objective. Keyword="Meant." Historians, on the other hand, will have a field day dissecting and deconstructing the Bush Administration for a long time. Barring the threat of nuclear holocaust, of course.

Saber Rattling from Iran

Is it that Iran is following the North Korea model or does North Korea follow the Iranian model? Either way both nations have long histories of loudly lauding their accomplishments on the world stage in order to frighten other nations into giving concessions. Not much has been heard from North Korea lately. Much has been heard from Iran. This is a common tactic. Next time you're in the supermarket, observe how the children react when mom or dad tells them they can't have anything, breath-holding/throwing objects/pouting/crying/screaming "I hate you" always ensues. Weak parents (those whose self-confidence is determined by their child's opinion of them) will give in. Strong parents will not. Lesson for the United States and its allies: See through the BS, but keep a wary eye out for wayward objects thrown your way.

 

Information Overload...

Last Thursday, Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor reported that the US intelligence community was planning to implement a massive data collection and integration system. It will integrate all sorts of seemingly disparate information into a single database based on algorithms that search for specific patterns. The idea is that intelligence can be gathered from seemingly unrelated sources, processed and integrated into an easily accessible database to complete a link-analysis diagram or other intelligence product. Seems like a good idea, as long as it doesn't get carried away. It'll most likely be run by the NSA.

Uncle Sam tried to do something like this before out of DOD...remember Total Information Awareness? They're symbol was that creepy eye and pyramid on the back of $1 bills...they folded under enough popular and congressional pressure. They still exist, without a web presence at least, but are much less powerful than before. Perhaps something like that will block this info sweep from happening. Doubtful. I dont really care. I’ve got nuthin’ to hide.

A stagnant union...

Tonight, Mr. Bush gave his annual State of the Union address. I thought it went farily well. At least, as well as a war-mired and unpopular president can hope for. He articulated a few proposals that were interesting; less dependence on foreign oil and increased funding for science and technology were the highlights. Read the full text of the speech at the White House website.

As many presidents before him have done, getting past petty partisan politics seemed to be a recurrent theme. Albeit, one that is mostly idealistic. All politicians want to cooperate on bi-partisan legislation, not a lot of them possess the political will to do so. Bi-partisan cooperation may be nice, but it is the opposition of two parties with both extremist and moderate factions that affords us the greatest benefit of democracy: stagnation. Government is about the only facet of life that benefits from stagnation. This is not to say that the long waits at the DMV or County Records office are great. Frankly, those suck. In terms of lawmaking, however, stagnation prevents potentially dangerous legislation from ruining our lives. I know, you're thinking about the Patriot Act and how it was implemented so quickly after the September 11 attacks. First, go read the full text of the Patriot Act, not the highlights. Read it straight from the source, not from the ACLU, Amnesty or other organizations. Read the language. Decipher it. Think about it. Don't rely on others to make a judgement for you. Read and ask yourself, honestly, how does this adversely affect my life? Big Brother is not watching. Despite what conspiracy theorists might say. Big Brother doesn't exist. How much processing time, money and personnel do you think it takes to process the library records of 300 million Americans? Honestly...much more than they have available.

Legislation that is the product of stagnant lawmaking tends to be watered down, harmless to the average american citizen. Not ineffectual, just less ambituous than when the authors originally wrote it. Next time you think, "republicans are stupid" or "stupid, liberal hippy democrats piss me off" think of the benefit of a two parties-in-opposition system. Think of stagnation and competition. They're quite useful, indeed.

Ohhh, silly blog...you don't need updating.

Talking to your blog as you would another human being is wrong on so many levels.

Today we got a message from the king pig f****r himself, via that bastion of fair and unbiased news reporting, Al'Jazeera. Osama sent a tape sometime in the past couple of months claiming that more attacks are in the works. He also extended some sort of truce. Don't know the terms, though. Read the full text of the tape at CBS' news site. Supposedly, according to King a55hole, God does not allow al'Qaeda to cheat or lie. Depends on your definition of cheating I guess. And God. God certainly did not intervene when al'Qaeda hijackers took over commercial aircraft on September 11. Sort of seems like cheating. Not like cheating on an exam or plagiarizing an article. No, more like cheating   and murdering American citizens. I think that qualifies. I thought that SOCOM had this f**kwad in custody already; or had at least chopped him up into tiny bits, dipped the pieces in acid and dropped them over the Indian Ocean. Guess that hasn't happened yet. Time will tell if he makes good on his threats.

NASA finally got to send up a probe to Pluto today. You can read about the program on NASA's website. Guess they were delayed for a couple of days due to technical and weather issues. The trip out to Pluto is supposed to take 9.5 years. Let's do some math. According to NASA, Pluto is about 2.8 billion miles away. It's about as many miles away as the populations of China, India, Canada, the United States and Mexico combined. That's a lot. 2.8 billion miles divided by 9.5 years is about 294 million miles per year. That's the population of the United States. 294 million miles per year divided by 365 days is 805 thousand miles per day. 805,000 divided by 24 hours is 33,000 miles per hour. Damn. That's fast. It's the fastest traveling spacecraft the United States has ever built. Can't wait to see what it finds out. Well, let's see if I still even remember it in 2015.

Signed up to participate in an interesting project with NASA. It's called Stardust@home, which is based off the SETI@home project. I find out more in March, but the objective is to look at pictures of an Aerogel collection grid and search for traces of comet dust. Specifically, the trails that the dust leaves in the Aerogel as the dust itself is miniscule. If I find one, I get to name it and be cited as a coauthor of any papers that come out announcing the find. Sweet. Should be quite interesting. You can find out more about this project at the Planetary Society's website.

That's it for today. Too much going on in the world for me to write about in one short blog post. 

  

   

So, people actually read this thing?

That's a big surprise. Got a couple comments on earlier posts that I just saw today. I din't think anyone but me read this. Thanks LeechDog, you wine-making bastard! You should call him up and find out. 

Got some major shenanigans to report today. Seems that The Smoking Gun broke a story about author James Frey's supposedly truthful memoirs about his violent and substance addicted past. The Smoking Gun followed the author's criminal paper trail and were unable to corroborate the man's story. Memoirs are supposed to be truth not fiction, right? Read the full story at http://www.thesmokinggun.com It was recently selected as part of Oprah's book club. Oprah's stamp of approval does not necessarily identify a well-written piece, merely a piece that Oprah likes. And we all know that whatever Oprah likes, millions of mostly female readers will like as well; guaranteeing commercial and financial success for whichever authors happen to be on the list at the moment. This is despite the fact that the book is atrocious. The few excerpts available on the smoking gun were awful. It made me want to buy the book and burn it so that others wouldn't have to suffer through its crappiness. But alas, I won't put money into that guy's pocket, even if he is a fellow SAE. Phi Alpha! Faker.

Man, I wish we had Naked News available in the States. It would make my evening news watching so much more interesting.

I've been listening to a lot of Coldplay recently. Don't know why. Don't know how. It's a nice change from the usual Interpol and Modest Mouse diet I've been musically subsisting on for the past year or so. Time for some new flavors. I'm diggin' Parachutes but Rush of Blood to the Head is a good listen too. Politik, Spies, and Don't Panic are currently my favorite songs.

Got XM radio for Christmas and I finally hooked it up this weekend. One word: Fanfukkintastik. It's like having 1000 CDs without all the scratching and jewel-case clutter. Awesome. I recommend you get one too. No stealth marketing intended.

That's all for now.  

Gambling...

Went to Pala this weekend and lost my a$$. Guess those Indians are exacting their revenge on all of us greedy whites. Started a new project - the picture-a-day project. We'll see how it works out. Stay tuned for details. Not much to write about right now, so I'll keep this short and sweet. Later.

Living as a writer

Searched around on Craigslist today for part time writing jobs. Some of the announcements were pretty good, work out of the house, contract type stuff. I thought it might be a nice thing to try. I've been told I have pretty good writing skills (not to sound pretentious). I know I can write a killer corporate memo or cover letter for an external survey. That just doesn't seem fulfilling enough. Maybe since I've been hanging around Writing Forums lately, I've become more picky about what I want to write. Less practical and more imaginative writing tends to be the trend over there. Not too bad. Although the place seems to be overpopulated with teenage-angst types. Look for me there. My handle is CopyMaster.

Condolences to the W. Virginia coal miner's families. I can't imagine how you must feel right now.

Seems that big-time Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has pled guilty to multiple counts of fraud regarding his lobbying activities. Okay, I've said it before, no matter where you are in the American social strata, if you f**k up and get caught, you deserve to pay. Enough said.

Oscar season is coming up. Seems that John Stewart has been tapped to host them. Should make for an interesting ceremony.

That's it for now. No lyrics again. I'll try and post some on the Myspace blog a little later tonight.

Sellin' out to the Man...

Look at the top of this series of posts...notice anything different? Yes, I have sold out to The Man. Google now has my tiny little blog wrapped up in its merciless clutches. They are pushing ads to my site while readers peruse my latest musings. Alas, I need some scratch just like everybody else. I'll take it where I can get it. So, help a brutha' out and click on the ads. Or use the handy Google search bar to seek out information on whatever you desire. It's quick, easy, and hassle-free. Use it once, and you'll want to use it again. And again. And again. There is no escape.