Stonehead

Hilarious video Safe for work

Arghh...where's that joke about the pirate driving me nuts?

U.S. oil production peaked in 1970; North Sea production peaked in 2000; every major oil province in the world is in irreversible decline, except for the Middle East. The Middle East countries have been the "swing producers." That is, whenever more oil has been needed to meet world demand, the Saudis could be relied upon to pump a little more because they were assumed to have the great infinite reservoir of oil. Now, if we stop to think clearly about that rather amusing notion for a moment, we will realize that, on a finite planet, there are only limited amounts of everything. So there must be an end to the oil sometime. --source oil production in 42 countries (graphs) Other links on peak oil: 1 2 3 4 K. Maybe I'm pushing the doomsday scenairo, but worth a look since hydrocarbons are what drives the global economic engine.

If you want bleak, do a Google search of the words, Peak Oil. The idea is that our hydrocarbon resources are depleting with no viable alternative for the myriad uses of petrochemicals. If the estimates are close, then the world peak should be about 2004-2010 or so. Even if we adopt another energy source for transportation we'll still be faced with a potential shortage of food based on our use of petroleum-based fertilizers, also a shortage of other contemporary conveniences such as pharmaceuticals and plastics. Better get in good with GregW 'cause the shit may hit the fan before it improves.

When the State assumes too much power: Museum of Communism. The founder and curator of the museum is Prof. Bryan Caplan, who recently received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, and has just joined the economics department of George Mason University.

My bad.

Ah, wouldn't that be 'fucktard' as in 'vehicular fucktard'?

Hey Greg, did someone cut you off this morning?

Here. Let me spell it out for you Greg. If someone cuts you off in traffic and you get all pissed off about it, then you'll probably go to work bent out of shape. Your day will start off like crap then you'll go home and possibly drag your discontent home to the family. Your wife and kids will be affected and so on. On the other hand, if you do as some of the others have been doing here, just let it slide off your back, then 'no big deal'. Get it? When I say 'world' I'm talking about the people you come into contact with during the progress of the day. Mmmkay?

Ran across this interesting article in New Yorker. Big and Bad some excerpts: The S.U.V. boom represents, then, a shift in how we conceive of safety--from active to passive. It's what happens when a larger number of drivers conclude, consciously or otherwise, that the extra thirty feet that the TrailBlazer takes to come to a stop don't really matter, that the tractor-trailer will hit them anyway, and that they are better off treating accidents as inevitable rather than avoidable. "The metric that people use is size," says Stephen Popiel, a vice-president of Millward Brown Goldfarb, in Toronto, one of the leading automotive market-research firms. "The bigger something is, the safer it is. In the consumer's mind, the basic equation is, If I were to take this vehicle and drive it into this brick wall, the more metal there is in front of me the better off I'll be." The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem.

I have a theory that a single act of aggression on the freeway tends to escalate the level of overall tension in our world if you respond in kind. The cascading effects are far reaching.

Climb this mountain!

"I believe everything, and I believe nothing. I suspect everyone and I suspect no one." --Inspector Jacques Clouseau, A Shot in the Dark

Here's some advice to some to make it consistently better.

why are you shouting?

sounds like sex

The ballot box is passé. Pat Robertson says that Bush will win in a 'blowout'. He heard it straight from the Man. From article: The Lord has just blessed him," Robertson said of Bush. "I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."

trask uses http://www.booble.com/.

what'll start trickling down? Turds?

Mein Gott!

"He evaded us for so long because he had such an ingenious hideout," Rumsfeld said. "Only someone as evil as bin Laden would think to crawl down into that hole inside every one of us, the one that makes us hate instead of love, forget birthdays, and ignore alternate-side parking rules."

He's secretly sequestered in a place where the streets have no names.

How do you know that all these avatars actually exist as autonomous personalities rather than as projections of your own mind? Kind of like in the search for God or for that ideal mate. It's like a reflection everywhere you look, if you look closely enough. Or like a magical hall of mirrors with some reflections distorted but all essentially having the same subject expressed as different images. Yeah, why try to figure it out?