Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Vladimir who daren’t dismount III. Estragon is french for sunflower. How in the hell, Samuel? These days, fossils are paying good money for carbon capture stories. More for the hacks. Lord knows we’ve them aplenty. The €13 billion-plus overruns Nord Stream in a time of global warming was silly. The commitment to fossils, sillier. Being dependent on Russia, was stupid. Nord Stream II was doubling down on silly and stupid. Enough Carpe Diem. Too...

There is the forbidden, there is the given, the meek, and the powerful, sustenance all the same. Biblically, the laws of kashrut were rather explicit, has scales, no kids in mothers’ milk, cloven hooves, well, there is a debate. How does it eat? The kosher laws were crafted initially as a code of conduct not for morality as we see it now, but about purity, cleanliness, safety. Keeping us alive. Little was known almost 6,000 years ago about...

As winter has begun to subside (finally) the real flurry of activity has to happen in short time, as in an every ray of sunshine has to be captured kind of thrust into the growing season. This is also the poorest time you will see farmers as they dump their entire wealth into yet another growing season. I can confirm; we’ve been running for a week straight and have committed the kids toothfairy money to compost, with no end in sight. My son will...

RJS, MarketWatch 666 Here I (run75441) am being lectured by the author, RJS. “last week you asked me to write something explaining how & why the GDP deflators were revised. So I did, expanding the paragraph I was going to write on it to six, and included it as an addendum to my usual reporting on the GDP revision at Marketwatch 666, however, three days after I sent it to you, it’s still not up on AB. I think it’s important, and that it...

Oil tops $100 for first time since July 2014; SPR at a 19-year low; total oil + product supply at a 7 3/4-year low RJS, Focus on Fracking US oil price tops $100 for first time since July 2014; SPR at a new 19 year low; total oil + products supplies, including SPR, at a 7 3/4 year low; distillate supplies at 26 month low; natural gas drilling at a 26 month high You already have the petroleum status report part of this posted (ie, “EIA, Latest...

Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers… In Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence I undertook to develop a theoretical foundation for ‘planned obsolescence’ from Georg Simmel’s analysis of the “preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed during the nineteenth century.” My intuition has proved to be uncannily prescient. Besides the indirect influence of Thorstein Veblen — by way of Vance...

Original Sin And Planes In The Air  The original sin of the current catastrophe in Ukraine was the failure of the US and UK to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine when Putin’s Russia seized control of Crimea as they promised to do in the Budapest Accord of 1994 when Ukraine gave up the third-largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world.  They are also now in violation of that Accord now by their weak effort to save...

War Comes to Kyiv | The New Yorker, Joshua Yaffa Interesting article that showed up in my inbox. This is a copy and paste ot it with minor editing. If you follow the link, there are other short articles to be read. I believe the takeaway from this article is the courage of Zelensky. The Ukraine will fall apart without him. Can the Russians be this bad militarily? The road into Kyiv is lined with military checkpoints, many of which are manned by...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, SPR at a 19 year low: total oil + products supplies, including SPR, at a 7 3/4 year low, distillate supplies at 26 month low Overall oil inventories finally rose after a million+ barrel per day jump in oil imports; commercial crude supplies saw their biggest increase since October 10th after pulling ~350k barrels per day out of the SPR, i.e. switching the deck chairs on the Titanic . . . other trends remained in...

Vladimir V. Putin Loses His Mind And Becomes A War Criminal Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has just announced a “special military operation” to “de-Nazify the Ukrainian government” so as to halt the supposed “genocide” being committed against Russian speakers in Ukraine.  There is not a shred of justification for any of this.  The extreme nationalist fascist groups in Ukraine do not support and are not part of the current Ukrainian...