You know, in all the fuss about Venezuela, I never once thought to check on the country’s population. So many people were making so much about it, I thought, gee, Venezuela’s gotta be playing in the big leagues, right?
Twenty-six million people.
WTF?
Twenty-six million people? Twenty-effing-six million people?
You have got to be kidding me. That’s barely a blip in the U.S. census. That’s the entire number of illegal immigrants in the southwest. No, wait, add in the northeast, too. What-EVER. I can’t believe we even care about such a dipshit little nation.
Actually, we only need to car about one of thos 26 million. Mad Hugo who is doing his best to destroy the country. And the only reason that we need to worry about him is the oil that he controls.
I have a lot of respect for you, but I don’t know what point you are trying to prove. Israel is a country of less than half of 26 million, and yet I (and I’m sure you) care about it as strongly as anything else in the world. Your tone really comes off as callous and bigoted–we are supposed to be defending what is right, but it’s hard to support your opinion when you refer to a country of 26 million as being “dipshit little nation.” I’ve read this blog religiously for two years; maybe it’s time I found someone with a higher moral standard worthy of defending the Jewish nation.
Somehow, I don’t think Meryl’s cat cares too much about Hugo, either :D
Hey! Who let Gracie post here?
Bad cat! Bad!
This “dip-shit little nation” happens to be a major source of oil imports to the USA, and any source that’s outside the Middle East is welcome. According to our government, Venezuela is our fourth largest source of petrol and crude oil:
http://tinyurl.com/7ldt
There is also the little matter of Chavez’s using his oil revenues to spread his own influence in South America, at the USA’s expense, forging links with Castro in Cuba (providing him with badly needed oil), Evo Morales in Bolivia, as well as other left-wing leaders in the region (Brazil’s Lula, Argentina’s Kirchner, Nicaragua’s Ortega).
With his petro dollars, Chavez is the moving force behind the planned regional bank (Banco del Sur), which is meant to be a counterweight to the IMF and World Bank. And he will be launching Petrocaraibe and Petrosur, to provide financing for oil purchases by states in the Caribbean and South America respectively.
He has bought tons of Ecuadorian and Argentinian bonds, and is bankrolling Telesur, a Latin American equivalent to CNN. He has also been working with Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner and leaders from Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay to block the U.S.-led proposal to restart talks on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. He has even attracted the support of the pro-American president of Colombia.
Whether this influence will last, and how deep this support by other L.A. leaders goes, I don’t know. But he is having some success at being a counterweight to US influence in the region.
“Dip-shit little country”? Our fourth-largest source of oil in the world. “Dip-shit little country”? An influential pro-Castro leader in Latin America, one awash in petro dollars!
Uh huh. Meryl, next time please do your homework before venting any spleen.
And while we’re on the subject of little countries, please note that Saudi Arabia has a population of about 27 million, including about 6 million non-nationals who are there just to work.
Wow. Some people just don’t want me to make jokes at Venezuela’s expense.
You know what? Take away the oil, and what have you got left? Yet another banana republic in the making.
Take away the oil from the Saudis and what have you got? A tribe of primitive death cultists in the middle of a desert.
Take away the oil from Israel and what have you got? Oh, that’s right. There is no oil in Israel. They gave back the Sinai.
Israel is a nation of technocrats, farmers, and industrialists that earned their wealth through brains and sweat. What have the oil nations done except to be lucky enough to be on top of a black gold mine? I’m supposed to respect that, and be in awe of Venezuela because Chavez has control of some oil?
I don’t think so.
I pray for the day when an alternative fuel is found that puts these dipshit little nations back where they belong. The oil wealth is funding the Chavista delusions of grandeur, and may be pushing us towards another world war. I’m not seeing any reason why I shouldn’t vent my spleen over this.
Any reason for a Gracie pic is a good reason. Yay, Gracie!
Meryl, when you say that you pray for the day when an alternative fuel is found, I agree with you there wholeheartedly. It would be great if it’s Israel who discovers or invents it.
I don’t think nuclear energy is the total answer because of the danger of accidents, and we can’t support an entire economy on solar panels and windmills, so I don’t understand why more research hasn’t been done on alternative fuels. Sure, oil seemed to be perennially cheap and ever-flowing in the 1950s and 1960s, but we were disabused of these notions during the 1970s. So what was our excuse then?
I’ve heard that the oil lobby and car companies suppressed research into ethanol and electric cars in the 1960s. Perhaps, I don’t know. But the government should have been frantically funding research efforts all over the country from the 1970s on. Think of it: If it had, we’d be 30 years into our research by now.
We shouldn’t have to wait for the last accessible drop of oil before thinking of switching; we should ideally be able to move well before then. Even the former Saudi oil minister, Sheik Zaki Yamani, understood this, and fruitlessly tried to warn his government by saying: “The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.” His warning that the Saudis should plan ahead fell on deaf ears in his country. Unfortunately, the West wasn’t listening either.
OK, so you say, take away the oil from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and what have you got? Well, yes, that might make the Israelis, Japanese, and Taiwanese feel better about themselves. Or any other nation whose main or only natural resource is human talent. But, let’s face it, the oil hasn’t been taken away. And the world kowtows to petrodollars. No one cares that the Saudis haven’t won Nobel Prizes or been innovative in high tech or found cures for diseases. And few care that Chavez is a demagogue on the order of Juan Peron. Oil covers a multitude of sins, and a multitude of lacks.
P.S. Cute picture of the cat.
‘take away the oil from Venezuela and what have you got?’
Unfortunately, a lot less oil to go round, and Chavez is exploiting those fears to the hilt. Stupid of course, but to him he’s not mad… Just threatening to stop his oil flowing bumps up the price..
Ethanol as a fuel is problematic, sure it saves on oil but it takes a lot of corn to make and that takes away from the food supply raising food prices. We’d have more oil if it weren’t for the tree-huggers and our government. So we depend on despots for oil. Price of oil goes up raises transportation costs thus raising food prices. Neither is a satisfactory solution.
However, a Gracie pic is always satisfactory.
Oil lobby schmoil lobby. If there is such a thing it sure is a pitiful excuse for one. We have enough oil that we could supply all of North America but this feckless oil lobby can’t seem to get the government to let them drill for it.
If only the “oil lobby” had half the power the environmentalist nut jobs have over policy in this country gas for my hog and your SUV would still be cheap,
I thought that we had a surplus of corn, which was why we turned to producing corn syrup, that unhealthy and high-caloric ingredient that has been added to a lot of prepared foods in this country. Maybe ethanol would be a better use for that overproduction of corn.
Equal time for Tig!
Some people need to get a sense of humor. Great post, Gracie!
Ethanol to replace oil, from corn that costs A LOT of oil to produce: fertilizers and farm equipment depend on oil.
Want to drive down the power of the oil producers? Join them. Unleash US oil production AND refining and the cost of oil will drop dramatically.
Add nuclear power, which is not unsafe, and we won’t need oil for electricity. France uses nuclear power for 3/4 of their energy needs. When’s the last time they had an accident?
Economic power that derives from added value develops many aspects of a nation’s capabilities. Economic power from raw resources stultifies. But resource-driven economies are easier to loot, which is why we see them in the hands of tyrants, who don’t want their people capable anyway.
Looks like Chavez’s Venezuela isn’t quite the juggernaut some people think:
Yep. I’m with Gracie on this one.
Oil companies were knocking their brains out trying to find economical ways of creating gas and liquid fuels from coal, and developing ways to squeeze oil out of oil shale, back in the 1970’s. Some of these approaches looked promising in an environment where oil prices were expected to break through the $100/bbl barrier by 1984. But that didn’t happen. The high price of oil ended up choking back demand, and that, coupled with new exploration, caused the real price of oil to drop to the lowest (constant dollar) prices since before 1973.
What happened?
We got sloppy and started building ever-bigger cars and SUV’s. China and India started taking their first real steps toward developing a consumer economy, and they started buying oil. The OPEC nations started pinching back on the spigot, while the Iraq war made people nervous about continued supplies from the region. Oh, and then there was Katrina.
We would have been better served by imposing (gradually) a $2/gallon gasoline tax. It would’ve been painful, but it would have kept demand growth down and encouraged conservation. That money would have stayed here instead of going to the oil supplying nations.
Nuclear power? Why not? Anything to wean us off of the Oil Teat, say I.
“…Some people need to get a sense of humor.”
The problem is that it is not always easy to sense tone on the Internet, especially, in this case, as Meryl tends to use the same facetious voice when she’s joking or making a serious point.
You can say now Meryl was just kidding, but I think she was following the dictum that “many a truth is said in jest.” She may have meant her original post half in jest, but she was obviously making a substantive point.
As for Venezuela not being a juggernaut, that may well be true, but that’s a far cry from its being a country easily dismissed. Our fourth major provider of oil is going to remain important to us, no matter what clown is ruling there.
On Elisson’s comment: I thought that we were able to get oil from Hussein via the oil for food program. As for the idea of a tax, an economist friend of mine said the same thing, that we should have a steep tax as they do in Europe. But suggesting an additional tax, however well justified, would be political suicide in the USA. That would mean “big government,” don’t you know. And wasn’t it Cheney who said that “SUV’s are part of the American way of life”?
You know, I get that humor is subjective. But I would have thought that readers might have gotten a clue that I wasn’t 100% serious because I was:
1. Posting as Gracie (take a good look at the byline)
2. Put up a picture of Gracie in the post (to make sure people knew I was posting as Gracie) and
3. Posting in a manner I almost never post
Do I really think that Venezuela is “a dipshit little nation”? Frankly, prior to making that post, I hadn’t thought about it that way in all. I was wondering how big a nation it was, did a quick search, and the result was this post.
But in all honesty, yep, I’m with Gracie on this one. Because an accident of nature is no reason for me to respect you, any more than an accident of birth is (cf: Rockefeller types, celebrity children, heir and heiress, etc.). In my book, respect needs to be earned. By yourself.
Just as an aside, electricity and hydrogen are not fuel sources. They are energy transport systems. Both need to be made and stored and then used. The power to make them still needs to be something else.
We may have a surplus of corn, but it would take a huge amount of corn to make enough ethanol to replace gasoline as fuel. More than our surplus.
Cute cat. :)
EI
A tax is worthless to provide new energy sources. High prices encourage investors and inventors to find new ways to economize and new alternative resources to replace the high priced ones. Give the money to the government instead and all you get is pork barrel welfare for Archer Daniels Midland.
One logical thing we could do if we wanted more ethanol is to drop the protective tariff on sugar-derived ethanol from Brazil, instead of subsidizing domestic production so that corn prices are bid sky high, causing food prices to skyrocket both here and in Mexico. But the farmers (mostly wealthy people or agribusinesses) who are getting rich off subsidies would scream bloody murder to their congresscritters, so that’s off the table.
One important area of research is energy storage, something I have been talking about for decades, though I have had no sensible ideas how to improve the task. Really efficient electricity storage devices would mean we could generate electricity by any means we wished and store it so as to use it as if it were gasoline. There are some developments here, but need to move faster.
One of the great things about nuclear energy is that we know it works efficiently at producing large amounts of energy in concentrated form. New reactor designs are safer than the old ones, which have a pretty good record when properly handled. Killing the nuke industry in this country was one of the most incredibly stupid things we ever did.
“You can say now Meryl was just kidding”
I said it as soon as I saw the post. As Meryl said it’s not that hard to figure out. It’s a *cat*, for cryiin’ out loud.