Debunking the 'Peak Oil' theory

Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) published a report which argues that the 'peak oil' theory used by some groups to scare us about our energy future is based on faulty analysis (and mentions that this is the 5th time that 'peak oil' is 'announced' by liberal 'scientists'). CERA says that 'peak oil' won't be reached until 2050, even at current production increase rates, and there will be plenty of time afterwards to find energy alternatives.

Cultural degeneration and anti-war sentiment in Europe

Thomas Sowell had a very interesting article yesterday, titled Going Quietly? It's about the decline of the European society as it's losing it's worldwide power. Here are some excerpts from Mr. Sowell's article:

Two generations of being insulated from the reality of the international jungle, of not having to defend their own survival because they have been living under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, have allowed too many Europeans to grow soft and indulge themselves in illusions about brutal realities and dangers. The very means of their salvation have been demonized for decades in anti-nuclear movements and protesters calling themselves "antiwar." But there is a huge difference between being anti-war in words and being anti-war in deeds. How many times, in its thousands of years of history, has Europe gone 60 years without a major war, as it has since World War II? That peace has been due to American nuclear weapons, which was all that could deter the Soviet Union's armies from marching right across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. Having overwhelming military force on your side, and letting your enemies know that you have the guts to use it, is being genuinely antiwar. Chamberlain's appeasement brought on World War II and Reagan's military buildup ended the Cold War. The famous Roman peace of ancient times did not come from negotiations, ceasefires, or pretty talk. It came from the Roman Empire's crushing defeat and annihilation of Carthage, which served as a warning to anyone else who might have had any bright ideas about messing with Rome. Only after the Roman Empire began to lose its own internal cohesion, patriotism, and fighting spirit over the centuries did it begin to succumb to its external enemies and finally collapse. That seems to be where Western civilization is heading today.

The achievements of Western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west. The classic example is slavery, which existed all over the world for thousands of years and yet is incessantly depicted as if it was a peculiarity of Europeans enslaving Africans. Barbary pirates alone brought twice as many enslaved Europeans to North Africa as there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed. How many people have any inkling that it was precisely Western civilization that eventually turned against slavery and began stamping it out when non-Western societies still saw nothing wrong with it?

The Public Debt

A few weeks ago, after I posted an article on the decreasing federal deficit, one reader raised the issue of the total outstanding debt (a record value), and I gave a tongue-in-cheek reply saying that nobody knows who we own that money and we should just not pay.

But it made me curious, so I looked for some figures on how is that 8.5 trillion debt structured, and here it is:
40.6%: Federal Reserve and government accounts. This is money that one part of the government owns to another part, so seriously, it doesn't count.
22.7%: Foreign and international. Ok, so we owe about 1.9 trillions to foreign countries. Considering how much money we gave to other countries over the history, I think they could give us a break. Just count how many foreign debts we completely erased. And actually, a careful analysis could find it more profitable to just invade those creditor countries and make them erase our debt. Maybe even impose a tribute and get some extra money to the budget.
6.5%: Private pension funds
6.3%: Mutual funds
5.4%: Misc others
4.2%: State and local governments. Well, state and local receive a lot of federal money, so if they still want it, they should ignore the debt.
4.2%: Commercial banks, S&Ls and credit unions
3.5%: State and local government pension funds
3.3%: US Savings Bonds
3.3%: Insurance companies. Everybody knows they make huge profits, so they can just pass on that debt since they still make a lot of money from ripping off customers.

So this leaves us with only 29.2%, or about 2.5 trillions of debt (mostly to pension funds, bonds and other securities), which I would say is totally manageable.

The big picture on economy

An interesting article was published today by Jonah Goldberg in the National Review. Here are some of the things he argues:

Poverty, as defined for millennia, is pretty much nonexistent in the United States. Until very recently, poverty was defined by material scarcity of essentials, chiefly food, shelter and clothing. Today, some people go without these things, but scarcity isn’t the culprit.
To understand how subjective poverty in America is, one need only recognize the fact that most rich people from a century ago would be considered poor by today’s standards, and today’s poor would be considered rich by the standards of 1900. In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity, and 1 out of 10 homes had flush toilets. Today, pretty much all of them do. In other words, the tangible goods that defined wealth have been democratized.
Absurdly, according to the official measurements used by the federal government, fewer people lived in poverty in 1973 than today. But in 1973, most poor people didn’t have a car. Today, almost 75 percent of those officially in poverty have a motor vehicle. Today’s poor households, according to statistician Nicholas Eberstadt, are more likely to have telephones and televisions than non-poor families were in 1970. In the 1970s, undernourishment still factored into poverty. Today, obesity is a far bigger problem.
There are other factors that seem to be invisible to government bean counters. We live in a “knowledge economy,” but the folks who measure the gross domestic product don’t count the money spent on research and development (as well as money spent on training and education) as an investment. Instead, the government merely counts each iPod twice: “when it arrives from China, and when it sells. That, in effect, reduces Apple — one of the world’s greatest innovators — to a reseller of imported goods.”
Meanwhile, the single-most underreported good-news economic story of the 21st century so far is the explosion in American productivity. From 2000 to 2004, productivity in the United States grew by 17 percent. That is a staggering number which tells us more about the long-term health of the American economy than statistics about the GDP, unemployment or wage growth.

The hypocrisy of the "green" celebrities

I think everybody is sick of the various Hollywood celebrities touting their green lifestyle and fight for a better environment. For most of them, the main weapon is the hybrid car, their fantasy that driving a Prius will save the world. It's true that Priuses do great on gas, but the same celebrities usually fly private airplanes, which more than compensate for the few gallons of gas their hybrids save. TMZ has published a list of such extravagancies, among which we found:

• Brad Pitt has several hybrids, but his trip to Namibia used 11,000 gallons of jet fuel, which is enough to take a Prius to the moon.
• George Clooney has an electric car, but for his Tokyo trip he burned 7,000 gallons of fuel, which might have helped his car cross the Pacific 57 times.
• J-Lo drives a Prius, but her recent trip to New York (for which she allegedly refused to pay) burned enough gas to propel her hybrid for 45,000 miles.

Liberals again at war with Economics

Remember when the oil and gas prices were going up? Democrats claimed it's Big Oil's conspiracy to pump up their profits. Bush and Halliburton were giving a hand. Now that oil and gas prices are falling it's again Bush's "fault".

Maybe we have to think what is the root cause of all these lunatic conspiracy theories. It's because liberals are in open war against any kind of science, including Economics. They don't understand the principles of offer and demand. They don't understand price dynamics. These are concepts they can't grasp. And this is because they are all Marxist who don't believe in free economy and who have the strong conviction that the Government drives all the aspects of the economy. You think this is crazy? It's not. Remember in the spring, when the liberals wanted laws to control the gasoline prices? When they wanted a windfall tax on oil companies profits? Everything comes from their economy handbook - that's "Capital" by Marx. As long as that's their economic Bible, they'll never understand what a free economy is.

American policies in the Arab world

There's been a lot of talk in recent days about how fighting terror only produces more terror, adding to the old cliche that Muslims turn terrorist because of American policies in the Middle East. Now let's go back in history, to the 1990's, and let's see what the US policies were back then. US liberated Islamic Kuwait from secular Iraq and protected Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam, from the same enemy. America went to war along the Bosnian Muslims against their Catholic and Orthodox foes. America attacked Yugoslavia in order to protect Kosovo Muslims. American troops went to Macedonia to protect ethnic Muslims. (Actually, there still are thousands of American soldiers in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, and nobody is asking for a timetable for their return and a rapid redeployment).

Then, America suffered losses while providing relief to poor Muslims in Somalia. It's been giving out over 10 billion dollars in foreign aid every year to Muslim countries like Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and even Afghanistani Taliban. And what was the Islamic reward for all this? It was the '93 World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and ultimately the 9/11. After 9/11, America changed its attitude and reduced many of those Islamic support activities, and what is the result? No attack on America has occured ever since, outside of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.