MISSISSIPPI SAMADHI: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN… BUT YOU CAN’T STAY

Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.

Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.

So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.

Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING…

So now all the metaphors of the Earth as a living organism, living and breathing and having its being, begin to make sense, now that its death seems imminent. What is life, after all, without death? The one certain fact of life is death. Reproduction is optional, and most of us are just going through those motions, which is good. After all overpopulation is still a problem, though no longer problem number one anymore, or is it? It’s hard to say given the exponential potential of population figures, given to long-term surges and spikes that defy short-term analysis and remedies. Considering that the Earth got its first billion around 1830 and got its sixth around last Thursday, the conversation usually deals with surges, but the opposite can happen also. This was certainly the case around the time of the Roman Empire, when the same population movements and political turmoil that toppled Rome also stifled population growth, which was stagnant for a thousand years. Other population ‘bottlenecks’ may have produced the conditions under which our freakish little g-g-g-g-great-granddaddies survived and thrived while others normally the most likely to succeed perished. The thought of excessive population growth was simply never discussed until the 1960’s and particularly with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb. He predicted looming disaster for a world that at that time had only just reached three billion and some change. However right he might have been, he was equally wrong, as was Malthus before him, both proponents of the ‘small world’ mentality that assumes that resources are limited and that stupid humans will breed themselves into extinction if given the chance. The rapid technological advances of recent years that have increased grain yields by 250% were simply never envisioned, much less the idea that thinking people might consciously limit their families as a part of a continuing cultural evolution. Inconceivable to many people to this day is that fact that many others simply have no interest in having children AT ALL under any conditions.

In fact some commentators even say that the world faces under-population, speculating that the world population will peak at somewhere between seven and a half and nine billion somewhere between 2040 and 2050 and then drop sharply. While those numbers may be close enough, it’s probably too early to tell whether population will actually decrease or merely increase at a slower rate. Either way it should become less of an issue, though keep in mind this is a population much larger than today. The commentator even points out that at the current birth rate of 1.4 children per married couple, Japan’s population will be down to 500 by the year 3000. While this is a fairly absurd scenario, more fodder for Hollywood movies like Children of Men than reality itself, it not only shows the difficulty of making predictions, and hence policy, but also the dangers of extrapolating current rates of anything indefinitely into the future, including rates of global warming. So much for computer models. The same mentality that made a conscious adjustment in the past can also make one in the future. People are agents with some degree of free will not reducible to statistics. Nevertheless there just might be another law of population yet to be articulated. We’ll call it the law of ‘Nature hates a vacuum.’ It seems that, given time, people will fill any and all open space(s) to the extent that it is suitable to sustain them and there are populations available to fill them. Over time an equilibrium should be reached, except in cases and places where viruses and bacteria still rule. The only populations expected to increase significantly beyond 2050 are the relatively under-populated Africa and Middle East. So if overpopulation is such a non-issue these days that a Google search generates less than two million hits (!), guess what generates the most hits as the world’s leading problem?

Okay, after the Iraq War, guess what generates the most hits as the world’s leading problem? Global warming, maybe, with forty million hits or so? How about rising oil prices with sixty million? Certainly these would rate anybody’s top five, maybe along with world hunger, AIDS, and maybe another minor inconvenience or two. So why is no one very worried about any of it? Earth Day last week should’ve been the biggest ever, shouldn’t it? It wasn’t. Obviously oil and gas prices are rising; no one can dispute that. It certainly seems that the planet’s weather is increasingly turbulent and the predictions are dire indeed. We should trust our scientists shouldn’t we? They are our best and brightest after all. They wouldn’t deceive us, would they? Surely this is not just some plot to contain China and her economic expansion, is it? Maybe, but I doubt it. Nobody’s THAT conspiratorial. But then again, Ehrlich was wrong and Malthus was wrong. Do the mass of people know something that the intelligentsia don’t? They just might. Surely I’m not the first person who’s noticed that the world’s two biggest long-term problems are somewhat self-canceling, am I? Rising oil prices means oil scarcity means oil depletion, right? The direst predictions put depletion somewhere near the end of the current century. The direst predictions for global warming also assume that things will be really bad by the end of the current century given current rates of fossil fuel consumption and related warming. But wait a minute. With the oil gone and populations level or decreasing, global warming should also decrease, shouldn’t it? I don’t see why not. Admittedly it could be a close race with some anxious moments, but we just might make it through, mightn’t we? We just might. Of course coal will never run out, but we’re not likely to be filling our car’s tanks with that, are we? So now they’re saying that the reason Antarctica hasn’t experienced much warming is because the ozone hole allows heat to escape. Will we revive the use of CFC’s to fight global warming? This could get really absurd. Let’s just chill, folks, let’s just chill. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

If the rationale doesn’t convince you, then the rising price of petrol just might. The closer we come to oil’s vanishing point, the faster it’ll rise, and the less we’ll use, right? But just like the earlier increase in grain production, gas prices are mitigated by advances in technology that get for our newer cars much better mileage than the old family Buick. So, once adjusted for inflation, we’re problem paying less for our transportation as a percentage of our budgets nowadays than we were in the 1970’s when the Saudis turned off the pumps to teach us a lesson. Hopefully we’ll have learned it by the time they do it again. If we had a viable substitute for oil, then Islamic jihad and Venezuela-inspired revolucion would vanish like LA smog under a downpour, in addition to easing the threat of global warming. All of a sudden nuclear power starts looking like the green alternative. Maybe dump the waste in outer space? If rising gas prices hit hardest in the US, it’s only because we’ve been shielded from it for so long. Though the same dollar increase, US prices are a 100% rise over a few years ago, less than 50% for the already far higher rates in Europe. Only now are prices equal to the inflation-adjusted record-high of 1981 at the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Of course we’re talking about much-devalued Confederate dollars now, so I’m not sure how they ‘adjust for inflation.’ Want to see a funny movie? See ‘CSA: The Confederate States of America,’ a 2004 mock-doc movie about “What if the South had won?” It’s hilarious. The joke about Darkie toothpaste is real of course, available anywhere in Thailand as ‘Darlie’. Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima are still widely available of course. Don’t turn up your nose. Spike Lee produced it. It’s almost like the real-life movie about, “What If George W. Bush had won in 2000?” I wish I could laugh at that one. Nevertheless it keeps life interesting. Back when life was rosy and secure, I was bored and listless. Now I can’t wait to see what might happen next. Will there be a happy ending?

(Almost ) ALL MY HEROES ARE PHYSICISTS

I can’t believe I just casually did a Google search on John A. Wheeler a few days ago. I mean, I like physics, but it’s not like I keep running tabs on all the main players. We never had physicists on baseball cards in my childhood. If we had, we’d’ve attached them to the spokes of our bicycles with clothes pins so that our Radio Flyers would sound like Harleys on Valium while we pummeled Einstein to shreds. So the last time I saw Wheeler was on the cover of Discover magazine about five years ago in purposeful silhouette at the age of ninety-one, fading to black. This is the guy who coined the term ‘black hole’ and did much to revive relativity (and Einstein) and restore it to respectability from the sidelines where quantum mechanics and particle physics had relegated it. He’s also the one who explained general relativity simply as, “Space-time tells matter how to move. Matter tells space-time how to curve,” which I always thought was quite helpful. He also helped invent the atomic and hydrogen bombs and supported the Vietnam War, but that’s another story; after all Chomsky supported Pol Pot way beyond reasonable deadlines.

So I Googled Wheeler only to find he’d died but a few days before. All you theoretical physicists out there already knew that, of course, but I’m not a theoretical physicist, though if I had it to do over… Physicists are like athletes; they usually give their best at an early age and then spend the rest of their lives in eclipse. Schrodinger’s anno mirabilis at age 39 in 1926 was the great exception. Einstein had his at age 26. I know people still taking classes at age 39. Wheeler, student of Bohr and teacher of Feynman, lasted until age 96, beyond many of his students, like the linguist Franz Boas outlasting both his student Sapir and Sapir’s student Whorf. Wheeler was thus the last link to the golden age of physics, Einstein, and the quantum superheroes Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc. So now the torch passes to a new generation of physicists and the presiding elder now is the particle superhero Murray Gell-Mann, followed closely by the black hole and big bang biggies Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth, among others patiently waiting in line. Fortunately there’s also the ubiquitously photogenic and always smiling Michio Kaku, who explains it for us homies, because the rest of these guys seem pained to string words together into a sentence, apparently more comfortable with equations, though understandable with Hawking’s Lou Gehring disease. Kaku probably has a booking agent. You can find Gell-Mann’s and Guth’s phone numbers on-line. Can you believe that? I’m thinking of calling them. Murray Gell-Mann wears a tie hand-painted by Jerry Garcia. He apparently doesn’t care to be top-dog physicist either, since he also devotes his twilight years at the Santa Fe Institute trying to organizing linguists into finding the protolanguage that was mother to them all. That’s pretty cool. A lot of people would say it’s a waste of time. I wouldn’t. It’s just the flip side to ‘theories of everything,’ and that was you-know-who’s Big Waste. How many linguists are trying to explain the Big Bang?

If I had liked math more maybe I’d have gotten into physics before I became old and senile, but I doubt it. My high school didn’t even have a physics department, but that’s not the reason. The problem was the math, not that I wasn’t any good at it, but I just didn’t like it. I actually scored quite well on the math SAT, far higher than the verbal component, but that’s not what I wanted, was it? Or maybe it wasn’t what I needed. I needed explanations, and math didn’t do it. Still it’s strange for a Rankin County spelling bee prodigy who’s at least better than average at foreign tongues. There’s an idiot savant on TV who claims to be able to speak twenty foreign languages though he tends to not be able to find the bathroom and pisses himself regularly, but I doubt it. For one thing, on closer examination, he’s only actually fluent in three or four, so that’s no big deal, about like the average Belgian or Chinese Malay. For another thing, his Chinese tones are shit, which proves that idiot savants are still human, if nothing else. Mostly I imagine it’s just the long detour and fruitless path that foreign languages have been on since Chomsky decided that they were somehow magically ‘acquired,’ not learned, and which the Rosetta Stone language programs expect you to learn through reverse osmosis and parrot-chat. I’d like to see how much Hindi you learn by clicking merrily through the Rosetta programs with no knowledge of the Devanagari alphabet.

There’s more than one advantage to having a thousand channels on your TV screen. In addition to getting some good old-fashioned mind-candy as entertainment, a thousand movies giving you other people’s lives rather than your own, you might just learn something. I’m not talking Link TV, either. That’s good, an eye on the world, but mostly politics. I’m not sure why it comes on the religion frequencies. No, I’m more interested in Science TV, and even the NASA channel, in addition to old favorite Nat Geo and the History Channel, which seems to have moved beyond Hitler into the myths we live by, which is good, since Discovery has gone busting them as fast as they can. You can hardly read books on science anymore, since they’re out of date by the time they’re published. Internet’s good if you can trust your sources, but beware self-proclaimed intellectuals with more paper on the walls of their bathrooms than their offices. TV fills in the gap nicely. A good documentary beats YouTube or MeeVee any day, and it’s nice to see real scientists get their fifteen minutes of fame, however awkward or gawky or geeky they might just be. Some of them are a real hoot, and it’s not easy to remain unaffected by their infectious enthusiasm for their subjects, whether it be linguistics, DNA or physics, not coincidentally MY favorite three subjects. The personalities are not the important thing, of course, the information is, information that just might save our lives or our sanity or our planet or something.

Physicists just may be on to something big. They’ve diddled-off and dry-humped a long time since the last REALLY BIG THING, black holes, whose existence has only recently been confirmed (sort of) with the advent of the Hubble telescope. Sure there was a lot of hype when new particles were being discovered (sort of) every year, but that was not much different from the race to discover atomic elements a century before, and ended up asking as many new questions as it answered. Who can really keep up when they start introducing such bizarre concepts as ‘strangeness’ and ‘flavors’ in the actions of quarks, leptons, muons, gluons, etc. anyway, not to mention the elusive illusive allusive tachyon? So since then particles have been re-invented as strings with frequencies and dimensions to boot, and when strings get together of course first thing you know you’ve got membranes, whatever, anything’s better than ‘dark matter’ which starts looking more epicyclical every day, if you could only reconcile it with black holes, relativity, i.e. Quantum Gravity, the Holy Grail. In other words, why is gravity so weak in Nature and so… so… so EVERYTHING in a Black Hole? M-theory is now seriously considering parallel universe(s), which is where we come in, and everything ‘solid’, at the intersections of their planes, the dimensions of gravity, electromagnetism, and atoms, among others, mixing and matching, agreeing to disagree, and getting on with the business of reality. Next thing you know, they’ll even be suggesting that one of those dimensions is mathematically equivalent to what their metaphysical bastard cousins have always intuited as the spiritual world, the supernatural made natural, ready for a comeback as science. Let’s see a linguist do that. That’s why I like physicists; they could do that if they want. They’re smarter than me. Don’t you hate it when you read something and get the sneaking suspicion that the writer knows less than you?

Over-Population and the Price of Gas in Flagstaff

Oil prices kissed one hundred bucks a barrel yesterday for the first time in history, only slightly mitigated by the fact that a buck ain’t packing all that much of a bang these days. But that’s a psychological barrier, so everybody starts waxing philosophical about the future of the planet, etc. Don’t worry about the planet. That’s the problem- human arrogance, to think that ‘the planet’ is all about us, and only us. The planet will do just fine. Don’t worry about you and yours either. You’ve never had it so good. Don’t even bother worrying about ‘life’. Bacteria are quite resilient, around almost as long as there’s been something liquid to swim in, even surviving ‘global freezing’ a full hundred million years before the Cambrian ‘explosion.’ ‘Global warming’? Piece of cake, at least for the gigajillions of bacteria that we host symbiotically. They’ll find other sources of food, even without our plumbing systems. If you want to worry about something, worry about the species. There’s good reason, not least of which is the fact that almost all that have ever existed are now extinct. The fact that our intelligence gives us an advantage is easily outweighed by the fact that it also causes most of our problems. A dumber species might do better in the long run, if only they’d stop breeding so much.

We’re victims of our own success. Evolutionary success is equivalent to reproductive success, usually. We humans have to change all these equations to suit current fashion, so that now cultural evolution is arguably more important than the biological kind. That’s too bad, because we sure now how to screw, up a good thing, that is. Will we ever be content just going through the motions? As always, time tells. For millennia the overriding principle of life was to reproduce it, the more the better, ‘family values’ defining our interactions and even reaching the status of religion Back East. Wars used to be fought to capture people for resettlement and lineage expansion, long before anyone thought of putting up borders to keep them out. So now that we’ve conquered the planet how do we conquer ourselves, our desires, our traditions, our obsessions? After all, global warming is only a problem because there are billions of us producing it. If there were only a billion of us world-wide, you could drive all the Buicks and Pontiacs you wanted. Over-population was an eighties problem, largely forgotten since China dealt with it, however haphazardly, on their own front. China’s good at seeing the writing on the wall, even in foreign alphabets. India will pass them in population soon, and others are making up for lost time also.

We sometimes worry about those billion or so ‘yellow devils’ ‘over there’ creeping through the cracks into Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants around the world, General Tso’s ultimate strategy of infiltration through the stomach and bowels, unlike the Western obsession with hearts and minds. Given their traditional obsession with cash income in all trade relationships, our mutual relationship runs sweet and sour. They invented it, after all, paper money and playing cards. The Opium Wars were more about currency than drugs, at least the first time. Opium was currency, the only product they would accept besides silver. The rest is history. I assure you they worry much more about those billion ‘white barbarians’ surrounding them on all sides, i.e. Europe, America, and Australia. India’s right there, equal in total numbers, especially if you add their sub-continent and cultural neighbors Nepal and Sri Lanka. Islam accomplishes with dogma what India failed to accomplish with karma, bringing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia over to their camp to surpass a billion. The population race is in a dead heat, emphasis on ‘dead.’ Maybe it’s time to lay down our crosses and swords, penises and wombs, and call it a truce. Modern warfare certainly no longer depends on the human wave assault. Words defeat the sword; information defeats bombs.

Limit reproduction to two children ABSOLUTELY and see how many of our problems might go away. Instead of giving tax credits for more children, give tax credits for less. After all, cultural evolution allows for many forms of satisfaction, not just watching your sons and daughters grow up to despise you. The main ‘proof’ for global warming is that chart of ‘inconvenient truth’ showing a spike in temperature that coincides perfectly with the spike in the industrial revolution’s exhaust emissions, first coal, and then oil. Has nobody noticed that that graph also coincides with the spike in population that equally defines our epoch? After steady population growth since the origin of food production some ten thousand years ago, from around the year -500 BCE to around 500 CE the world population remained relatively stable, stuck at around a hundred million or so, at least a quarter of them in China. It only managed to double in the next thousand years, given devastating political turmoil and the growth of cities, a great career move for bacteria and viruses. Then the playing field went berserk. As the ‘Pax Britannica’ eventually won out internationally and Materia Medica won out internally, that stalemate changed radically. The Industrial Revolution created the wealth, in real terms, to sustain large families, with fewer of them now dying. Even Chomsky will admit that we’re richer than ever, albeit with lingering problems. Only Africa has been systematically left out of the prosperity, with life expectancies still hovering around the low forties in many countries. The world got its first billion simultaneously living inhabitants right around 1830. It got its sixth billionth right around… wait a minute…

What I want to know is why, with oil hovering at a hundred dollars a barrel, is gasoline hovering locally at three dollars a gallon, the same as when oil was selling between sixty and seventy dollars a barrel? That would be due to certain, uh, psychological factors, right? Supply and demand, right? Tell that to the poor guy trying to feed his family in the Third World outback. Don’t blame America. Prices, if anything, are MORE in the third world; the US, by comparison, tends to be cheap. In highly competitive Thailand, prices, at current exchange rates, are right at four dollars a gallon for the premium grades. In quasi-Communistic Cambodia, they are at least that for the low-grade blends, ditto for Canada and their integrated NAFTA economy. The recent riots in Burma were sparked by a sudden increase in gas prices. Riots had already occurred in Indonesia, an oil-producing nation, for the same reason. Without Communism to keep it honest, it seems that capitalism no longer is. Is Islamistan any better? The USSR used to subsidize her satellites; does Arabia? She must, if Egypt can sell gas at $.65 a gallon, less than Kuwait or Riyadh. Egypt doesn’t produce any. It’s only $.12 right now in Caracas. What does that say? How much is dependent on local real estate prices or political considerations or profit margins, and how much goes to government taxes anyway? Gasoline is currently selling at $1.74 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the U.S. commonwealth territory. It is exempt from most US taxes. Remember what the price of a barrel of oil was in 1998? I bet you don’t. It was twelve dollars. Have things changed that much in ten years, be it supply, demand, output, income, China, America, Europe, or Islam? Oh yeah, I almost forgot… 9-11, that explains everything.

We’ll lose the battle against global warming without renewed population control efforts. I can think of a thousand reasons to control carbon emissions, but that’s just not enough to reverse global warming. We will lose that battle. Any thought that the oil will run out before the heat becomes too much ignores coal, which is not only dirtier, but which will never run out. Any more questions?