Wednesday

The lovely Mrs. Sneed has the flu bad. So bad in fact that she stayed home from work. I can't recall the last time she did that. This doesn't bode well for our upcoming trip to Las Vegas this Sunday. I was reading a news article about the record price of oil and thinking about how people don't understand the law of supply and demand. Many of the people who posted comments about the article pointed to George Bush and US policy in the Middle East, as the reason for high oil prices. This assertion may make poster feel better, having vented a bit, but it misses the point. The producers of oil can command record prices for crude because there are countries and companies (and people) willing to pay the price demanded. The emerging industrial giants of Asia are adding to the demand for the finite supply of available crude and driving up the price. When I go to put gas in my Honda Civic every couple of weeks, I see lots and lots of gas-guzzling pickup and other large vehicles at the pumps. My little Civic gets about 30 mpg around town, so I drive it and leave my old pickup in the garage. That's a pretty simple decision. If I had decent mass transit available to me, the civic would sit too. So long as we opt for a lifestyle based upon oil, and mostly foreign oil, high prices will continue to be a problem. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and now, another Bush, have known that our dependence upon oil is a dangerous path. Not one of them showed the leadership to alter that path. Maybe the next President will. Who knows? Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky