POLITICS - A Rant, For All Of Us

Why do I like Slashdot? The community. Where else can you go to read about lawsuit between SCO and IBM and find a little gem like this in the comments section? (Don't worry. You don't need to know anything about UNIX or license agreements to get the gist of the post, which is probably about twice as long as what I've excerpted.)

I'll tell you a little secret. Oil is, and always has been the _top_ national security concern of the United States of America.

This little spaceship Earth of ours is rapidly heading for a major crisis. The United States consumes 20 billion barrels of oil a year. The world consumes 76 billion barrels (2001 numbers).
In 2001 only 8 billion barrels of new oil was discovered, and that was spread out over 300 relatively small and economicaly challenging fields.

Did you catch that? We burned 80 billion barrels of oil this year but discovered less than 10 billion. This has been going on for many years now. A few years ago the rule of thumb was we burned 4 barrels for every barrel discovered. Now it's 8:1. And China and India or only just getting started.

It's January 7th, and you're putting 4 logs a day on the fire, you look out the window and you see only 120 pieces of wood left in your wood pile. Oh well! We'll figure something out before March!

At any rate, the point is Bush and all is oil patch buddies are painfully aware of this little dilema and they know just what to about it. Secure the oil, and batten down the hatches on the populace.

Go to the online CIA factbook (google: cia factbook; i'm feeling lucky) and look up the country you live in, say Norway for example, scroll down to the "Economy" section and check out the "oil produced" and "oil consumed" figures. Interesting, eh? Norway is one of the few exceptions, a country that actually produces more oil than it consumes. In fact, Norway is the _only_ country that produces more than 10 times the amount of oil than it consumes. Anyway, that's not the point. Now click on the little graph icon next to "oil produced". Examine the top 20 oil producing countries. Ask yourself, which of these countries does the US control through one of these means: trade agreement, corruption, bullying, family ties :) ?

Which ones does the US not yet fully control? Now you know who's next on the hit list.