Next Gas 500 Miles

China, always looking for reliable energy suppliers, is investing billions in new Venezuelan oil deals. Reuters is covering this as Venezuela wants to “to lessen its dependence on its arch-foe the United States.” Well it might, but not as much as Chavez wants to shift oil away from the U.S. for ideological points. Even with the free tankers, shipping costs will net Venezuelans a dollar or two less per barrel than they could get from the U.S.

Forget claims about a million barrels a day to China by 2012. It will almost certainly be more than that as Venezuela swaps dependence on one power for even greater dependence on another. Diversification is just a temporary feature.

If you’re tempted to shrug and say “Big deal, we’ll get oil elsewhere,” you should focus less on our percentage of imported oil and more on MPB – miles per barrel, from field to Ford.

A Good Rule in Life

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. - P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs

C ** All done

The inventor of FORTRAN has died:

Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand.

My computer is not taking the news well. It keeps flashing this old Data General FORTRAN error code: “Error 155 – You can’t do that.”

Human Shields for Trustafarians

Jack Langer has a piece on Human Events describing his experience with anarchist protestors from an International A.N.S.W.E.R. rally. This is priceless:

The police announced through a bullhorn that they’d use teargas if the protestors didn’t return to the parking lot. In response, a female-looking anarchist in dreadlocks yelled out to me and some other reporters nearby, asking if we’d help get the word out that the police, without cause, had gassed peaceful protestors. “No!” I instinctively yelled back, eliciting some shocked stares from the anarchists. Another anarchist approached us and asked if we’d stand between them and the police to prevent the cops from “attacking” them. He pointed to one elderly female reporter: “You ma’am, if you get in the middle, there’s no way the police will knock you over.” The request caught me off guard -- I was unaware that old women are used as human shields anywhere outside of the Middle East.

The group sat down in front of the police to decide what to do. Some people passed out food, at which point most of the anarchists removed their masks and bandanas to eat, then put them back on when they had finished. My respect for this bunch was rapidly declining.

I just wonder if they left their juice boxes behind when nap time rolled around.