Pump Pressure
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Economy, Energy | 1 Comment
Once again, another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep yesterday, the pump price now at $4.09 a gallon for regular, down a whole dime since the last visit 10 days ago.
Gas prices are dropping, which in the short run for consumers is great news, but the look of the whole oil process makes one wonder what the shit is going on here — after dipping nearly $20 a barrel the last week or so, the surge is back.
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for August 2011 delivery was trading at $112.63 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange. The contract closed off yesterday’s trading session up 3.3 percent.
(Illustration found here).
Despite the drop this past week, oil is back — and it didn’t seem to take long.
The big move, of course, was the International Energy Agency (IEA) decision June 23 to release 60 million barrels of oil in the coming month from each of the 28-member nations’ Strategic Petroleum Reserves — about half of that, about 30 million barrels of oil, came from the US reserves.
The OPEC boys, however, were pissed.
From The Financial Times and a possible blow-up between East and West:
If you pay attention to the rhetoric, the answer could be yes.
Abdullah al-Badri, Opec secretary-general, has made strong comments against the International Energy Agency.
“I hope this practice will be stopped and stopped immediately,” he said. “We don’t see a good reason to release this quantity and I hope the IEA will refrain from using this practice.”
…
The release has not altered the supply and demand gap in the third quarter and the fourth quarter either. The global economy will need extra oil from July to December.
The IEA has clearly explained that its release is a stop-gap measure until the oil from the Gulf arrives.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will still find a market for their extra oil.
…
In private, Gulf countries are not making any retaliatory noises.
Nor they are particularly happy about the whole affair.
True, the hawkish side of Opec, which include countries such as Iran, Algeria and Venezuela, would scream against it.
But what really matters is Saudi Arabia and its allies.
And they are not complaining.
Maybe the oil markets will be quiet for awhile.
Or maybe not — what’s gonna happen?
Scientific American asked Jim Burkhard, the managing director of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ Global Oil Group to make a guess:
Oil prices were already on a downward trend in mid-June, but they did fall further following the IEA’s June 23 announcement.
But keep in mind the oil market is influenced by a vast array of factors — power shortages in China, agricultural policy in India, the weather in northern Europe — many factors shape the price of oil, so attributing too much importance on any single factor can be a bit misleading.
What we can say is that, at least immediately following the announcement, it did lower prices.
But whether that’s sustained is a big question mark.
Dude, we’re looking for something more definite here.
Well, we’ll just have to wait and see — the one thing I’m extremely-sure of is that my Jeep will need fuel again, no matter what pressure is put on the pump.
Hope for the best, expect far worse.
‘Run Away, Run Away’ — The King is Reanimated!
Filed Under Literary, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
“Well, we’ll not risk another frontal assault. That rabbit’s dynamite.
– Graham Chapman as King Arthur in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail‘
By way-far, Monty Python was (and still is) the most original, outlandish and side-busting funniest group of twits ever to light up an entertainment venue.
One of the most hilarious, and profound, bits was from the group’s UK TV show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which ran from 1969 to 1974, where Eric Idle made an edict from the government that in order to save precious land in Britain, people will no longer be buried whole, but instead family members would eat their dead and then vomit into small holes.
The announcement so upset the studio audience, they booed and screamed, and eventually stormed the stage and destroyed the set.
I couldn’t find any reference for this particular sketch, although I do most-distinctly remember seeing it some time in the mid 1970s via PBS’ showing of the Python series — the closest is the renown ‘The Undertaker‘ skit, which also included the studio audience storming the stage.
Monty Python was adapt at jabbing authority itself, sometimes twisting an already twisted reality to fit an imagined take on different people, places and things — crazy, and seemingly as random as sniper fire.
(Illustration found here).
Monty Python — Graham Chapam, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones — has been disbanded for a long while, although the group’s impact on humor the last couple of decades has been profound.
And although Chapman died of cancer in 1989, there’s a film afloat to bring back the king.
From UK’s The Guardian:
Now Graham Chapman, Monty Python mainstay and title star of Life of Brian, is set to rise again in a 3D animated biopic.
…
Adapted from the actor’s 1980 memoir A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI, the film will blend contributions from the surviving Pythons with audio of Chapman reading from his book, recorded shortly before his death from cancer in October 1989.
According to the New York Times, the picture is the brainchild of producers Ben Tremlett, Jeff Simpson and Bill Jones, the son of former Python Terry Jones.
It is set for a theatrical release in the UK next spring.
…
In keeping with the skittish, mercurial tone of Chapman’s autobiography, the film version will be assembled from a range of contrasting cartoon segments, produced independently by 15 different animation houses. John Cleese is expected to play himself, with Palin co-starring as Chapman’s father and Jones mimicking the late comic’s mother.
Of the surviving members of the Python team, only Eric Idle has yet to sign up.
“We would only do a [Monty Python] reunion if Chapman came back from the dead,” Idle once told an interviewer. “So we’re negotiating with his agent.”
Now, that would be something completely different.
The Faucet (And The Clock) Is Running
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Weather | Leave a Comment
Always a skeptic, and although never a doubt about global warming, the speed in which this shit will strike hard at everyone’s daily lives has always seemed a bit understated.
Report after report, study after study indicated the real mess of climate change will come in the future — somewhere down the line in 2020, 2030, or the end of this century, 2100, and so forth, but it appears the brains have undershot the reality and it’s here already.
Some times, I just hate being anywhere near right.
And mankind is the asshole ruler of the planet.
The human species is the polluter, even beyond the horror of volcanoes with their smoke and fire belching into the heavens: In fact, humans release roughly 135 times more carbon dioxide annually than volcanoes do, on average, according a new analysis. Put another way, humans emit in under three days the amount that volcanoes typically release in a year, according to the best estimates of volcanic emissions.
And with people like us in charge, we’re fried.
(Illustration found here).
From Nature Geoscience (full report behind a pay wall — synopsis below found at physorg.com):
Professor Paul Valdes of the School of Earth Sciences, discusses four examples of abrupt climate change spanning the past 55 million years that have been reconstructed from palaeoclimate data.
In two of the cases, complex climate models used in the assessments of future climate change did not adequately simulate the conditions before the onset of change.
In the other two cases, the models needed an unrealistically strong push to produce a change similar to that observed in records of past climate.
Professor Valdes concludes that state-of-the-art climate models may be systematically underestimating the potential for sudden climate change.
No shit sherlock.
And dang it, sherlock is right.
Apparently, the ocean’s currents are forcing the earth’s ice pack at its poles to melt even faster.
From Climate Progress on a new study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute:
Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say — a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels.
The glacier is currently sliding into the sea at a clip of four kilometers (2.5 miles) a year, while its ice shelf is melting at about 80 cubic kilometers a year — 50 percent faster than it was in the early 1990s — the paper estimates.
…
One day, near the southern edge of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, the researchers directly observed the strength of the melting process as they watched frigid, seawater appear to boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.
To Jacobs, it suggested that deep water, buoyed by added fresh glacial melt, was rising to the surface in a process called upwelling.
Jacobs had never witnessed upwelling first hand, but colleagues had described something similar in the fjords of Greenland, where summer runoff and melting glacier fronts can also drive buoyant plumes to the sea surface.
…
The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS (West Antarctic ice sheet) outlet glaciers will become.
Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle.
The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS…
And to combat this quickly spiking rise in sea levels, a new approach has been offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Don’t fight it as costly seawalls and dikes eventually fail because sea-level rise is unstoppable.
From the Washington Post last Sunday:
The analysis, “Rolling Easements,” published on the EPA’s Web site, hopes “to get people on the path of not expecting to hold back the sea” as the warming climate is expected to melt ice around the globe, EPA researcher James G. Titus said.
…
The EPA report said governments have three options to deal with sea-level rise: They can stay on the well-worn path of building expensive protection and raising streets and buildings.
They can beat an organized retreat from the shore, perhaps by offering financial incentives to people and organizations to move inland.
Or they can allow people to do whatever they want for their waterfront properties but tell them in no uncertain terms that they are on their own when the waters rise.
It’s all the same to every single member of the human race — in no uncertain terms, we’re all on our own as waters rise and the clock ticks away.
No Soul
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
One of the most-horrible stories in a long, long list of horrible stories coming from war waged nowadays:
Insurgents tricked an 8-year-old girl in a remote area of central Afghanistan into carrying a bomb wrapped in a cloth and then detonated the bomb remotely when she was close to a police vehicle, Afghan authorities said yesterday.
Only the girl was killed in the blast on Saturday, which occurred in Uwshi Village of Charchino District, said Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police chief of Uruzguan Province.
Shirzad said he believed that the girl was completely unaware that the bag that she had been given by Taliban insurgents held a bomb.
(Illustration found here).
The fun-looking child above is some US kid dressed for Halloween — might just be the same age (maybe a bit older) than that poor girl in central Afghanistan, but the sense of that photograph is the end result what never-ending war does to everybody.
What kind of mental attitude — Christian, Muslim, Hindu, what-the-fuck-ever — would trick a little girl into blowing herself to bits?
People without a soul — far, far worse than just being a terror-inducing asshole.
And what about this shit?
A suicide bomber in a wheelchair blew himself up at the entrance to a police station north of the city yesterday, killing three people and wounding 18, officials said.
Two police officers were killed and 10 injured in Tarmiyah, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, authorities said.
The head of the Tarmiyah city council, Qassim Khalifa, said it was not clear whether the bomber was really disabled or using the wheelchair as a way to deflect attention from security.
The bomber went to the police station saying he needed a letter from the police certifying he had been maimed in a terror attack, Khalifa said.
Iraqis who have been disabled from a bombing or shooting can receive compensation from the government if their injuries are documented.
“Police inspected him but not very carefully as he was handicapped or pretending to be handicapped, so they let him go inside the police reception area where the blast occurred,’’ he said.
Iraq is again becoming a nasty place for US troops — two were reported killed Sunday in the north, bringing to 11 the number who died just this month.
Along with our GIs, 17 Iraqi civilians were killed over the weekend, wounding another 17 — thank-you George Jr. for creating a nightmare.
And back to suicide — it’s now apparently a part of the wedding vows, wearing a bomber’s vest together.
From the BBC:
A husband and wife carried out a suicide attack that killed eight people at a police station in north-western Pakistan, the Taliban has said.
The attack took place late on Saturday in Kolachi, near the tribal region and Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan.
The pair entered the police station dressed in burkas, hiding rifles, hand grenades and suicide vests underneath.
They held staff hostage for several hours before detonating themselves, killing seven officers and a tea boy.
The pair pretended that they had a complaint to make when they initially entered the station before removing their burkas and launching an assault.
…
The BBC’s Orla Guerin, in Islamabad, says that the use of a husband and wife suicide squad by the Pakistani Taliban is a new tactic, and a new threat.
Already, our correspondent adds, the militants have resorted to using children as human bombs. And a suicide attack in Pakistan’s tribal areas last December was blamed on a woman bomber.
And ‘a tea boy?’
Along with this terror marriage in Iraq: Meanwhile, an Iraqi court has sentenced the wife of a slain Al Qaeda leader to 20 years in prison on terrorism-related charges, an Iraqi judicial spokesman said. Hasna Ali Yahya, the Yemeni wife of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was convicted of facilitating correspondence between insurgents and preparing explosive-laden belts.
This is war waged without a soul.
Shakespeare the Stoner
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Literary, Musings | Leave a Comment
Standing on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset and jane is in her vest
And me I’m in a rock and roll band
Riding in a stutz bearcat jim
Those were different times
And the poets studied rules of verse
And all the ladies rolled there eyes
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
– Mott The Hoople, ‘Sweet Jane‘ (Words and music by Lou Reed)
Creativity is just one delicious side effect of doing a bowl.
Somehow smoke opens new imaginative horizons where the creative factor weighs heavy in the air, alighting like a room full of bong smoke — oh the flow without interruption.
Marijuana lets loose those dogs of words: Last speculative point: marijuana also enhances brain activity (at least as measured indirectly by cerebral blood flow) in the right hemisphere. The drug, in other words, doesn’t just suppress our focus or obliterate our ability to pay attention. Instead, it seems to change the very nature of what we pay attention to, flattening out our hierarchy of associations.
(Illustration found here).
It’s in that high state where the flattening out come in real handy and the creative juices kick in.
Ironic, or maybe it’s just a jagged little pill for innovative thought, but Alanis Morissette agrees:
“As an artist, there’s a sweet jump-starting quality to [marijuana] for me.
I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life.
I can stave those off when I’m not high.
When I’m high — well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak.
So if ever I need some clarity … or a quantum leap in terms of writing something, it’s a quick way for me to get to it.”
Cop a buzz and you’re head over feet.
And now it appears one of the best-known and most-creative peoples in all of history, Bill Shakespeare, might have been a stoner, and a clue is Sonnet 76:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Shakespeare might have been more inventive than first realized, and research peoples want to find out for good.
In 2001, scientists at the The South African Police Services Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria analyzed the stems and bowls of 24 clay pipes — including a number found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home in England — and found traces of tobacco, suggestive evidence of cannabis, and mysteriously, two of the pipes showed signs of what looks like cocaine.
National Geographic explained: The analysis was made after a South African scientist had a hunch that reference to the “noted weed” in one of Shakespeares sonnets may have been the bard’s way of extolling the effects of cannabis. “There were very low concentrations of cannabis, but the signature was there,” said Inspector Tommy van der Merwe, of the Forensic Science Laboratory.
And with the Bard: Of the pipes that were found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home at New Place, several tested positive for cannabis. “We can’t prove that Shakespeare smoked these pipes, but we do now at least know what his contemporaries were smoking,” Thackeray says.
Now they want to dig up Bill’s bones.
From Fox News (h/t Raw Story):
Paleontologists are looking to examine the remains of William Shakespeare, hoping to unlock the mysteries of the life and death of the world’s most famous playwright — and to prove that the poet once puffed.
The bard is buried under a local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. And a team of scientists, led by Francis Thackeray — an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa — have submitted a formal application to the Church of England for permission to probe the site where he sleeps, perchance where he dreams.
…
“We have incredible techniques,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, referring to the “nondestructive analysis” the team has planned. “We don’t intend to move the remains at all.” Instead the team will perform the forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones and create a groundbreaking reconstruction.
…
Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time. The allegation has provoked disbelief and anger among some fans of the bard.
Prof. Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the Daily Mail, “I would be happy if they did open it up because it could put an end to a lot of fruitless speculation.”
“If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, citing similar evidence found in Virginia.
However, there’s the curse Bill put on his grave:
Others may have issues with digging up the body, which goes directly against the late playwright’s dying wishes.
Shakespeare, famously fearful of the happenings of his own remains after his death, had a curse engraved on his tomb: “Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones.”
Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, told Reuters that “Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation.
The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave.”
Dude, it’s just bones — chill a second, then re-fill the pipe.