The current spike in gasoline has folks all a flutter about this being the end of the oil economy, the death of the combustion engine, etc. It ain’t happening folks.

I will wager $100 with anyone who wants to, that we are not seeing the end of the oil economy. I have no take on whether or not that end will someday come as chaos or as a great boom of scientific achievement, creating new tech that gets us past oil. I’m just saying this isn’t it yet, not even the beginning of it. I have doubt that we’ll see it in the next 50 years, even with the industrialization of China and India. The current oil prices are artificial, as artificial as the stock bubble I started screaming about ten years ago. Oil is currently valued by fear, speculation, and mania, with a little help from the instability that Bush created in the middle east and several OPEC nations that are happy to keep the prices up. I studied the oil economy as part of my graduate research. It’s been a huge part of the political picture in Latin America, bigger than it has been here, for the last century. Subsidized Soviet oil let Castro break free of the U.S. The lack of it was one major factor that kept Jamaica from being able to do so. A belief that the expensive oil of the late 70s and early 80s would last forever, bankrupted Mexico when oil came back down, utterly destroying the peso in the process.

I don’t know what it is in people that makes it so easy to look at what’s going on right now and decide that it’s going to go on forever. During the height of the stock mania, there were well respected pundits and stock analysts saying that the NASDAQ would reach 10,000 and the Dow would reach 36,000. Between 20 and 30 years ago, people were saying most of the same stuff about oil that’s being said right now. It didn’t come to pass then, it won’t come to pass now. I can’t even count how many times in my life I’ve heard pundits say that we’ve reached a point where they’re not going to find anymore oil. That hasn’t even happened yet and I don’t think it’s going to happen too soon.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be really happy if this starts a permanent trend toward hybrid engines and clean diesel turbo engines. That’d be great. But right now, even with the trendiness and hype, those kind of cars only make up about 2% of the U.S. market. But there were plenty of predictions in the 80s that gas prices and fuel economy regulations were going to spell the death of the V8 for all but luxury vehicles.

If you follow the news heavily, you’ll see that our leaders don’t believe the hype on this either. They know that oil could be brought back down if the psychology changes and right people decide to do it. They’re more worried about trying to prevent a return to the really cheap oil and gas of the late 90s than they are about bringing down gas prices right now. We have heavy hitters in the U.S. policy apparatus talking about things like a regulated floor price for oil on the international market and stealthier versions of the same thing for domestic gasoline prices. I’m inclined to believe that with a return to $1.50 gas, hybrids and conservation and all of that would go back to being a fringe part of the market again, the same way that compact cars and family sedans with 4 cylinder engines dropped market share during the cheap oil and gas era of the 1990s up through the attack on Iraq.

The Christian Science Monitor is one of my favorite news sources, but their editorial bent is decidedly laissez faire on most economic issues. Imagine my suprise to read them even suggesting that the U.S. think about making oil a “social good” that would be heavily protected and regulated by the federal government.

Criticism of Rumsfeld Widens to Young Officers

By Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt

The New York Times

Sunday 23 April 2006

Washington – The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services’ staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.

Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.
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All I’m seeing on the news and news like programs this morning about Karl Rove is a focus on his shifting duties at the White House. Newsies try to get the GOP person, usually Mary Matalin, to say that this is a sign of trouble. She, instead, talks about how great it is to have their superstar focused on the midterm elections. So far, this staged back and forth is keeping the focus off of the fact that Peter Fitzgerald is likely to indict Rove sometime soon.

Nanotech is something that’s currently a bit overhyped, but this is the real deal and very cool. I don’s expect that we’ll be seeing The Diamond Age brought to life anytime soon, but I do think the potential of nonotech is the kind of thing that could usher in a whole new era of human existence.

Music geeks seem to be split about the trend toward finding ever more obscure parts of their favorite artists’ back catalogs showing up in commercials. The knee jerk response is almost always negative. But sometimes you’ll find them grudgingly admitting to enjoying hearing the songs more often or something. There’s also the fact that at least some of the marketing droids who are using this stuff were once record geeks themselves who went into some “creative” field and ended up as hipster-grup corporate drones.

I like a lot of the new “we sound like bands from the late 70s and 80s” music that’s come out over the last few years. It’s hard for me not to like it. These kids are way more faithful to the sound of their musical forebears than most of the people of my generation or my parents’ generation were to the music that inspired them. Liking the sound of this music is not nostalgia for me. I never quit listening to the music that inspires it. I’ve got two New Order CDs in the cd changer in my car right now. I do find these two trends coming together in a way that is personally disturbing.

I hear music in commericals sometimes that I can’t place. Usually, it’s that newer music that I just described from a band that I haven’t really bothered to listen to yet. From time to time, though, it’ll be a song that falls in a hole in my own music geekery. It’s from a b-side or import that I don’t have or maybe just an album that I listened to once when I was 14, decided was shit, and never listened to again. The slightly frightening realization I had the other day, though, was that often enough I have no clue whether what I’m hearing is genuine music from the late 70s and early to mid 80s or if it’s the new stuff. I can’t tell the real from the copy. As these younger artists start to cover the songs of the older ones or those older ones start to collaborate with the newer ones, will there even be such a thing as “real” and “copy” anymore?

I don’t know if I’ve said it here yet, but I’ve been saying it for weeks elsewhere: John McCain is far and away the front runner for the 2008 GOP nomination. He’s not a front runner in the way that Hillary Clinton is a supposed front runner in the Democratic race. He’s the real deal. He’s working for it. What I’ve noticed for a long while is that he’s definitely trying to win the money primary and win it early. If he’s able to bring on the right fundraisers and start getting donations from the right people, he’ll scare some other viable challengers from entering in the first place. He’s doing that and this is the first article I’ve seen in the national press that kind of addresses it. He’s actively out doing the things that he needs to get this nomination. I’ll be keeping a McCain watch over the next year and keep you updated.

Hillary, by the way, is the front runner because she’s got a high national profile, a proven ability to raise money, and most of the contacts that she and her husband cultivated over 30 years. So far, she’s only doing the bare minimum necessary to be a viable candidate for 2008. She is not already pushing hard for the nomination. I’m still not convinced that she’ll run. It wouldn’t surprise me, but she hasn’t put the kind of committment into it that would upset key insiders if she backs out. I used to say that I believed she was too smart to run for president this time around. I’m no longer convinced of that, but I’m still fairly convinced that she would lose the general election unless the GOP manages to nominate someone who is a total disaster, someone who makes George W. Bush look like Bill Clinton in terms of intellect, competence, and political skills. I think she could wait 4 or 8 more years to run and have a much better chance, but I’d rather see her spend another 18-24 years in the Senate, a thorn in the GOP’s side the entire time.

You should read the Time Magazine article on Tom DeLay’s decision to give up his seat in Congress. It’s a wonder that someone with his arrogance and hubris didn’t fall harder, earlier. I’d still very much like to see him in prison. I think it’s the only thing that will have any hope of humbling that man a little. Sadly, he may be right about the notion that he can continue to be an effective (and corrupting) influence on our national politics from outside of congress.