Has it only been a week?

Conditions: Warm and Sunny, some more.

The Oil is falling!

from the NYTimes:

A slide in oil prices has been gaining speed since the beginning of the year, as supplies remain ample and producing countries show little inclination to agree on production cuts.

The Energy Information Administration reported this morning that inventories rose by almost 6.8 million barrels last week, with more imports reaching American ports and refinery utilization falling slightly. Analysts said today’s slide was precipitated by the report.

The benchmark contract for light low-sulfur crude to be delivered next month fell by more than $1.80 a barrel to settle at $50.42 after regular trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. According to figures from Reuters, the price briefly reached $49.90 at one point in the afternoon.
[...]

Mild weather in December and early January have helped depress demand for distilled products like crude oil and gasoline, stocks of which are running high for this time of year. Refiners produced less last week, but not by enough to keep inventories from rising yet again, by 3.5 million barrels of gasoline and 900,000 barrels of other distillates.

As the government report noted, the member states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are further out of compliance with the group’s production quotas than many analysts expected. Earlier this week, Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, the cartel’s dominant member, dismissed calls for quick action to reduce quotas further and prop up prices. So it appears that there will be plenty of oil available in the market for some time to come.

"The market is selling off on the shocking headline showing huge builds in crude stocks," Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading, told Reuters. "The market may test the $50 support level, and see if it holds there."

Peter Beutel, the president of Cameron Hanover, said that some of the surge in imports seen last week in the statistical report represented shipments that could not be delivered the week before because fog blanketed the Houston Ship Channel, site of a number of refineries.

I think we've finally found a good use for Global Warming - messing with oil investors! The thinking is that the oil price was driven up over speculation about a cold Northern Hemisphere winter, speculation that has proven to be false. So instead we've seen a pretty major fall in oil prices. Short term, very short term, this is good news, and I am happy.


Escalation.

There's a lot of anger in the reaction to Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. The opinion is that Bush is doing the wrong thing, making things worse. In my opinion this opinion is likely more to do with his track record, rather than the actual merits of his latest decision. Indeed, if Bush had announced a gradual withdrawal, most of America would be cheering about it, safe in the knowledge that the sadly constant reporting of American soldiers dying in Iraq every night on TV would be eventually coming to an end. - Not that Iraq would be any better off, or safer, just that the Americans would be better off for leaving it. And over time, the blame for the gradual destruction of a sovereign nation would pile up on the former president's tarnished legacy. Little surprise, then, that he is still trying to find a way out that doesn't condemn his future.

Iraq was invaded for all the wrong reasons, by all the wrong people. The bullshit about Iraq or Hussein being a danger has long been shown for the criminal lies they were (not that any American leader will ever be punished for it and the subsequent the illegal invasion...), and the fact that it's an American invasion, as opposed to one backed by all the nations, hamstrings every single thing Bush's people try to do over there. But. The problem with Iraq (as opposed to Afghanistan - which was another botched invasion) is that it sits above an enormous quantity of oil. Oil that every single infrastructure on the face of the planet needs in order to keep going. From our cities to our seas, oil makes the world go around, and even though Iraq shouldn't have to suffer for that, it is the hard-edged Realpolitik we’re faced with.

In order to keep our civilisation ticking, we need to maintain our way of life, while also planning for the future. The future planning part is out of my scope, hopefully nuclear power can spread fast enough to take up the slack of rising oil costs. But the maintaining part essentially means that Iraq needs to be a stable, prosperous country that provides oil to the world at market rates. We all need that. Including Iraq. And since Iraq at the moment is a mess, collapsing into a civil war, and with the potential to become a new Afghanistan – which other powers in the region simply would not tolerate – what would Iran or Saudi Arabia do if Iraq collapses into a lawless state? Or Turkey, for that matter, who are very nervous about the Kurds creating their own nation right on the border. Withdrawing troops from the country is simply not going to help stabilise it. More troops are needed, and not just American ones - though I suspect other nations will only become involved when the Americans a) apologise to the U.N and b) actually start to make some progress. Neither of which is going to happen anytime soon.

So it's up to America, the brave, to shoulder this responsibility for now and keep going. It sucks for America, I guess, but that’s just tough.

Cartoon: This Modern World

Tom Tomorrow is a very funny political cartoonist. Enjoy his latest here:




Film Review: The Prestige.

Christopher Nolan once made a film that told a story back to front. It was received very well by the audiences, who found the challenge of putting it together gave a reward once they'd figured it out. To me, his latest film, The Prestige, has been constructed in a similar way, in that the audience is to enjoy itself stitching together the pieces he has made, in the hopes of liking the final picture they create. The difference is that Memento was actually a simple movie about a man deceiving himself in order to live. The Prestige is a complex tale of a rivalry evolving between two competing magicians, each of which has a different approach to their craft. Cutting the story up into flashbacks wasn't needed for this story to work. Using a lot of unnecessarily-confusing flashbacks and cuts, the Prestige eventually unfolds into an escalating series of revenges concerning a particular trick called the Transported Man, the different methods each has to it, with something of a 'surprise' ending.

It's a good movie, well made and well acted by all. And each lead actor well portrays the differences between the two competing characters, but the 'finale' of the Prestige (...) relies on an idea that, frankly, is pure science fiction. David Bowie, as famed scientist Nikolai Tesla, does his absolute best to sell it, but I just couldn't buy it. It's a gutsy move, though, because the nature of magic is that once you know the trick, all the magic is gone. Which (I think intentionally) is exactly what happens to us, the audience, in the final act of the film, the prestige.

The film is moody, a little depressing, a little fantastical, and left me feeling, well, not exactly elated. I hate to say that films need a well-defined good guy and bad guy in order to work, but I think this one suffers with both characters being dark. Who really cares when one bad guy defeats another? Much like Memento, we're left a little wanting.

Rating: 3 out of 5 dead birds.

End Transmission