The Economist thinks petroleum demand will fall.

Clearly the Economist has been quaffing from the Beyond Petroleum tap.  They argue that fracking has given us fantastic amounts of cheap natural gas.  Gas will replace gasoline and diesel to fuel the big stuff, buses, 18 wheelers, garbage trucks, big vehicles with room on board for bulky compressed natural gas tanks. 
   Then they wax eloquent about the improvement in gas mileage over the years.  I suppose.  On the other hand you could buy a diesel Rabbit that got 40 mpg back in the 1970's.  They don't sell those any more.  And a lot of the improvement is just on paper.  For instance the US EPA gives a substantial mpg boost to any vehicle that can run on alcohol. 
   Needless to say, none of the oil companies are forecasting a downturn in demand. 

Sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander

TV News has some victims of Obamacare wailing loudly about it.  First we have the Congress and Congressional staffers.  Since they invented Obamacare, and voted it in, it's only fair that they should enjoy the higher costs and reduced care they inflicted on the rest of the country.  Then we have the IRS, so impartial, so fair, and getting a big boost in budget, authority and manpower to ram Obamacare down the throats of the rest of us.  It's only fair that they should be sticking it to themselves as well.

Closing an embassy protects it? or something?

Looks like our valiant State Dept is closing up shop all across the Arab world.  The evening TV news shows embassy closings from Morocco to Bangla Desh.  And "closing" is accomplishing what?
  I mean the embassy buildings are still standing.  The ambassador and his staff are still in residence.  The code room still has the codes.  Classified documents are piled to the ceilings.  A Benghazi style raid works whether the place is open or closed. 
  Or are we talking about evacuating personnel, equipment, classified and codes back to the US?  Which is about the same as breaking off diplomatic relations.
   To say nothing about the wimpy look it gives the US of A.

Twitter, Fair and Balanced?

Got another email from Twitter, urging me to follow some important tweeters.  They were pushing tweets from Obama, FLOTUS, Valerie Jarret, and Susan Rice.  All solid balanced tweeters.  To be fair, they did list Newt Gengrich, but even so, that's four raving lefties to one rightie. 

Viking River Cruise Brochure

I dunno just how I got on their mailing list, but I did.  They have great brochures, beautiful photographs of beautiful European locations.  They run one and two week river cruises in big (450 ft) brand new modern river boats.  Pricey too, $7K to $14K.  The new boats are advertised to have super green hybrid engines and even an organic herb garden. 
Before these brochures started popping up in my mailbox, I had no idea that Europe was so well watered.  They run these big cruise boats to nearly every city in Europe.  They run from Amsterdam to Bucharest, with stops along the way at Cologne, Nuremburg, Regensburg, Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade.  As well as Basel in Switzerland.  And others.
   This good water communications must have had something to do with medieval Europe's progress into the most advanced place on Earth by 1700.  River transportation is as good as having a steam railroad, and a lot cheaper.  You don't have to buy iron rail and lay track.  That sort of bulk freight capacity has gotta be good for economic growth back in medieval times.
 
  

The Snowden Surprise?

The Russians gave NSA leaker Snowden a one year visa to stay in Russia, avoiding extradition to the US.  Which doesn't make the US or the Obama adminstration happy.  The Administration has been whining that the Russians gave them no warning.   It was obvious to the dimmest bulb in the house that the Russians were considering granting Snowden asylum ever since Snowden failed to make his plane to South America a couple of months ago.   He has been camping out in the Moscow Airport ever since. If that isn't enough warning, I don't know what is.
   Trouble is, there isn't much we can do about it.  The Russians don't buy much from us, we don't buy much from them.  We have no international interests in common.  Other than sending them nastygrams, we are pretty much stuck with it.  Russia isn't Pakistan, doing an Osama style helicopter raid won't work in Moscow. 

How the vacuum found its suck

I changed the dirt bag on my aging all plastic Hoover upright yesterday.  Put in a new bag from Lowes.  Man oh man what a difference.  With the new empty dirt bag the aging machine came back to life.  It sucked hard enough to lift the linoleum up off the kitchen floor.  I don't remember it sucking this hard when it was new, 10 years ago.