April 2011 – Page 33

Apr 01 2011

Late Night Karaoke

Late Night Karaoke

Apr 01 2011

Obama rolls out “plan” to cut oil imports by 2025

By Compound F

Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama outlined a plan Wednesday to cut America’s imports of foreign oil by a third by 2025 — a response to growing global energy demands and instability overseas.

What a crude little pearl of bullshit. First, even if Obama wins in 2012 (and why would he want to?), he’ll have been out of office for nearly a decade by 2025. He might as well say that by 2025, every American will be king of their very own earth-like planet, a perpetual fountain of youth, and stables full of trick-ass ponies. Dude has no imagination.

Worse yet, he grossly underestimates the magnitude of his “planned” cuts to America’s imports of foreign oil. And it has less to do with the exigencies surrounding peak oil than the fact of peak oil itself. We might be able to reduce our imports by only one third by 2025, if (a) we were operating on the gross Hubbert curve, and (b) the United States took the vast majority of the remaining oil leaving everyone else high and dry.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get all of the oil that’s in the ground (gross Hubbert curve) out of the ground. We grabbed the good, low-hanging fruit first; and are left with the cruder, more difficult to access, and more expensive to extract and process remnants. Very quickly oil will become more expensive to extract than it’s worth, leaving us operating on the net Hubbert curve, where the declining limb of production is very, very steep; where 2025 indicates world GDP more than halved due to oil depletion alone. Hell, Obama may be presiding over a terminal credit collapse even before his first term is over, due to the severe and continuing financial malfeasance.

Obama’s “plan” to cut imports by 2025 sounds a lot like my retrospective “plan” to be among the long-term unemployed. I forget where I read that Americans are like “super-sized crash-test dummies,” but I’m sure that was part of the plan, too.

Apr 01 2011

Muse in the Morning

By Robyn

Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Strongest minds are often those of whom the noisy world hears last.

–William Wordsworth

Drips 2

Apr 01 2011

Gha!

By RiaD

Sea turtles’ migration mystery is ‘solved’

Apr 01 2011

My Little Town 20110331: Etta and Roy Chandler

By Translator in Teaching

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River. It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about two long dead denizens of Hackett.

Mr. and Mrs. Chandler were old, even by my grandmum’s standards when I first met them. They rented that little house that my grandmum owned just to the south of her place. They moved in around, I guess, 1965 or 1966, give or take a year. Things were much different then.

Apr 01 2011

Lightbulbs?

By Edger

This is how it develops…

I decide to water my garden.

As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide my car needs washing.

As I start toward the garage, I notice that there is mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mailbox earlier.

I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

I lay my car keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the garbage first.

But then I think, since I’m going to be near the mailbox, when I take out the garbage anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my checkbook off the table, and see that there is only 1 check left.

My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Coke that I had been drinking.