Crude oil futures soared past $145 a barrel for the first time ever Thursday before a bounce in the U.S. dollar cut into the gains.

Be Warned, good people. Regardless of any of the happy lies flowing from the mouths of pretty much all our politicians as well as the wanna-be contenders, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. The world has ridden the crest of the prosperity wave for a long time and now that wave is crashing on the rocky shore, as all waves must.

The Fed has run out of fixes for inflation and can now only issue statements designed to slow it down. It can’t actually do anything any longer, and it’s running out of statement material as well. The interest rate can’t be lowered more than the 2% it’s at now, to keep mortgages payable so people can afford housing. Raising interest rates raises loan costs and sucks money out of paychecks, which reduces sales of homes and goods, which puts people out of work, which results in recession/depression. This would ultimately reduce inflation except that now, the current inflation is being fueled by the rising cost of oil, from which comes all of our plastics and almost all of our fuel to transport all our goods.

The rise in oil prices is due to the devaluation of the dollar. When oil is $50 a barrel and then the value of a dollar drops to half, oil goes up to $100 a barrel to compensate and it does it RIGHT NOW. Wages and most goods take longer to react since it takes awhile for the increased costs to be felt.

Since the world is tied to the U.S. economy and our dollar, the lessening of the dollars value has an added impact beyond the increasing price of oil. China’s economy, for instance, is slowing down, since they sell so much to us. Our devaluating dollars that we pay them with, buy less oil and raw materials as each day passes. So they must raise prices to us. Higher prices mean that we can afford to buy less because our wages haven’t caught up, which means that more companies have less income and put more people out of jobs because of it. 62,000 more jobs this past month in the U.S.. This rising unemployment bounces back to the other countries, like China, whose economic growth is dependent on our trade, and they start laying workers off, too, which creates recession/depression in their countries.

The original cause of the devaluation of our Dollar is simple. Printing too much. The global economy is based on international credit and the reality is that only about 5% of the money in circulation is paper and coin. All the rest is electronic and exists only on computers and notes in ledgers, so creating more money is a snap. The money supply of the U.S. can be doubled or tripled literally in seconds on a computer keyboard. This sort of thing can raise havoc with a national credit rating, and it has for us.

In order to finance the horribly expensive war in Iraq, our government has created the money out of nothing. The longer this has gone on and the more money that’s been created, the less that money is worth because our credit has a spending limit the same as you have on your credit cards, in the international market place.

Now things are out of control. It’s like a snowball rolling down the mountainside. The farther it goes the bigger it gets. This is the whole purpose of our system of Checks and Balances in our government that George Dubya Bush has completely violated, and this is why the snowball has become an unstoppable juggernaut. Our government is supposed to be financed almost entirely by taxes. As corporate profits diminish and employees are laid off, government tax income steadily decreases. Yet our government continues to escalate its spending, by both borrowing and increasing the money supply. We’re making less and spending more. No one can keep that up for long, and no nation, either. We’re about to crash.

For some time now I’ve been watching how both major parties politicians, House and Senate, are grabbing off all they can get instead of doing their elected jobs, and it finally dawns on me, why. Just now. This is partly why I blog, as digging into this stuff always makes things come clearer. They’re rats abandoning the ship, and they’re gorging themselves as much as possible before they jump off at their own safe harbor.

This is a bad sign, Folks. A real bad sign. Before, I just thought it was a mutual feeding frenzy before the Democrats take over again, but the Democrats are just as much into it as anyone else. They’re all doing it with utter disregard for their political futures. That’s a black omen of things soon to come. Gird your loins, kiddies. Load the old blunderbuss and stock up the pantry, I do believe Hell is coming to breakfast and the Devil is going to be hungry.

Built in Germany and sunk in Dubai harbor, this underwater restaurant offers a unique dining experience. Yes, those are palm trees.

Dubai is one of the little emirates in the United Arab Emirates in OPEC, UAE for short. The UAE is considered as one “country” among the OPEC nations, even though the emirates are actually a group of 7 little kingdoms banded together the same as states in a country.

Dubai is one of the richest because of its oil production and is engaged in massive housing projects.

Here’s the kicker: One FIFTH of all the construction cranes in the world are in little tiny Dubai. Dubai is fast becoming the new Mediterranean, and a favored vacation spot for Europeans. The sheiks who own the joint are out spending money like water, buying up toys all over the planet. This week in Australia, one Sheik Mohammed went a long way towards not just talking about the Australian racing industry but owning it. He paid $500 million to buy the country’s biggest thoroughbred breeding and racing operation, which now makes him Number One in Australia.

Dubai’s rulers are heavily investing in other world markets, such as a partnership agreement with Gaussin SA, France, in a joint venture to set up AED130 million (about $35.3 million) plant for hi-tech port trailers & industrial vehicles. This is all small change compared to these futuristic plans. You really should look at that one. And this one. Unbelievable! You really have to see this to understand why Europeans are flocking there and why oil prices have risen so high.

Capitalism is what runs the marketplace, competition sets the prices and what they do with their wealth is their affair as long as they aren’t using it to attack us. Of course, they’re destroying their desert ecology and depleting their source of wealth like crazy, which makes them a lot more like us than I care to delve into deeply, but at least they aren’t building war machines with the money. Now if Iran and the Saudis would just do the same.

Today’s a better day, neckwise. The strain pain is gone so now I’ll try to make up for yesterdays lack of scintillating repartee.

Found an article this morning about an Irish bar owner who declared March a “No Danny Boy” month, being sick and tired of drunk patrons singing this dirge-like lament, which reminded me of some of my own past mischief. A friend and I frequented a German-style bar where the band would play faster and faster as the night wore on, thereby inducing their customers to drink faster and faster. So this one evening we carefully chose a small table in the back, in the shadows and behind a pillar, and after things were rolling rapidly along, they began taking requests, which they always did after the crowd was half-looped.

So I sidled up and requested “Danny Boy” and quickly slipped back to our hidden table. Since the poor fool had uttered the name into his microphone, he was stuck with it. He tried to find the dirty rat who’d requested it, and coerce said rat into having to sing it, but I was well hidden. So the band played it and sang it, the drinking in the place virtually halted as everyone stared deeply into their beer mugs and it took them a good half-hour to get things going again even close to what it was before.

Years later I’m still laughing.

Florida and Michigan are in the deep fat now over the silencing of 5,163,271 American votes in their primaries, because their Dem. parties violated the rules by holding their caucuses too early. The real question here is can the National Dem. Committee deny voting rights to over 5 million U.S. citizens? Politics aside, this action seems basically unconstitutional and the governors of both states jointly stated “It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions”.

If my vote had been rendered worthless by some over-penalizing party bureaucrats, I’d want them to pay for my time and the gasoline it took. Multiply that by 5 million. By nullifying all those votes, they went too far in their idea of enforcing party rules. They forgot about all those who voted.

Since the McCain issue is settled, now it’s all about Clinton vs. Obama and the latter is showing his whiny side, crying over her “kitchen-sink strategy” in winning three of the four states primaries that were just held. Ummm, I think it’s called “politics”. Obama is a great speaker, full of lofty rhetoric that pours out of him apparently without effort, but every time he’s asked a hard question he equivocates. His experience really is lacking, he’s a junior senator who has done almost nothing during his short time in Congress, and there’s still the matter of that Blacks-only church of his.

Here’s some info about him and his church: Obama said “We were always playing on the white man’s court — by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn’t. The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage.”
Obama’s once described the white race as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”
“That hate hadn’t gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

In 1983, during college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

According to this site, Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother’s side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father’s side. Why does his father have an Arabic name? Why does every ancestor on his father’s side have an Arabic name?” The answer is obvious: They have Arabic names because his father’s side of the family tree is Arabic. Hussein Obama isn’t black, he’s half Arab, which explains why all the Arab and all the Islamic organizations including Louis Farrakhan support him. Yet he claims to be black. He’s not.

He’s coming across more and more as a very thin-skinned guy, while with Clinton I sense a certain amount of desparation. Both of them are under tremendous pressure, and one of them may end up doing a Dean Scream yet that will decide which one gets their parties nomination. It’s fascinating to watch, anyway, while they pant and suffer.

Something I’ve never understood is why anyone would want that job so passionately. Bush, with Big Oil behind him, now that makes sense. But just because they want to be King of the Mountain? Mitt Romney spent a chunk of his personal fortune, millions, on a losing campaign and Clinton has tossed in $5 million of hers.

Usually, by the time your term ends, everyone hates you anyway. I just don’t get it.

There are untapped oil and gas reserves in Somalia, very possibly huge ones.

U.S. forces are in Somalia and it is claimed that a U.S. Air Force AC-130 plane, hunting for Islamic Al Qaeda militant hideouts, bombed three targets, including two houses.

Somalia is probably the single poorest nation in all of Africa and the Middle East. They’re so poor that the people can’t afford to eat, let alone buy weapons which are horribly expensive by their standards. After all, an AK-47 costs around $1500 and the average income for a Somalian is less than $1000 a year. You can’t buy clothes, food and provide shelter, and hope to have anything left over for $1500 AK-47’s, not to mention the cost of ammunition. So where are the guns coming from that are being used by Islamists to attack the government?

Well, let’s see. Who else is in the immediate vicinity, is Islamic, produces oil, doesn’t want any competition in that area and has made that abundantly clear? Who else but Saudi Arabia. The same people who destroyed the World Trade Center, who kicked us out of their country, who will kill you for bringing in a Bible, and who have cut back production of oil to keep the price dramatically inflated, which is wrecking our economy. Just a small list from their litany of crimes.

This is the same problem we’ve had in Iraq. Most of the muslims we’ve been fighting there are Saudis. It takes a huge amount of money to conduct a war, and those poor Iraqi citizens don’t begin to have that sort of cash. They’re being funded primarily by the Saudis, who don’t want us to have access to Iraqs oil. The Saudis are interfering with us and attacking us anywhere they can to prevent us from getting oil from anywhere except them.

This is why we have a military presence in Africa, focused in on the oil-producing areas, and why we’re going to have to fight for every square inch of it that we can gain. At the same time, China is already exporting oil from Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo, as well as the Middle East.

Even at $100 a barrel, the price of gasoline in China is a third that of Europe and Japan where it’s heavily taxed. With a 1.3 billion population and a rapidly expanding economy, China is now #2 behind the U.S. in oil consumption. However, the increases in the cost of oil affect all economies, and prices for goods from china are rapidly on the rise.

If China can fight off the imported Saudi insurgents and lock in their African supplies, and if we can do the same, dependency on Middle East oil will slacken dramatically. For this reason, the Saudis will continue to attack, secure in the knowledge that if we stop them, we stop the flow of Mid-East oil. Since neither we nor China wants to fight each other, our separate African “territories” are already being demarcated and in this arena we then have the dubious pleasure of being both allies and competitors.

Meanwhile, the price of goods on the world markets is rising, while our own manufacturing is declining because of outsourcing. This has lead to increased unemployment, which causes the average wage to decline as people take lesser paying jobs to keep eating. With the rise in costs, the comparable value of the dollar declines, so the lesser wages buy even less. This is the road to poverty and America is on it.

There is only one genuine solution to this problem, which is to invade Saudi Arabia and take over the oil production. By continuing the share of oil exports to those already getting a percentage, and by selling it at a reduced price, we would have no problems with China. I would not be surprised if this hasn’t already been discussed between us and the Chinese. We both need the oil and we’re both getting robbed by the Saudis. This would have a salutary effect on the global terrorism problem as well, since it’s funded primarily by the Saudis, it would let us and China quell our attackers, bring peace to Africa and thereby free up the African oil fields for production.

This is turn would finally bring development and prosperity to Africa.

The financial power of oil is behind the rise of militant Islam, and that also is the product of Saudi Arabia. The purpose of the Saudis in pushing militant Wahhabist Islamic terrorism upon the world is solely to gain access to the worlds oil. The Saudi royals don’t even like Wahhabism, it’s a constant threat to their personal power, but it’s a cloak they can hide behind and a powerful tool they use very effectively in their quest for control of the oil.

First, spread Fundamental Islam by tying it to the dream of a new Islamic Empire. Then tell the people they have to repel the Infidels, that’s us, first. That it’s their Sacred Duty to do so. To die for Allah. But they’re not. They’re dying for oil and they have no clue.

As calls for his impeachment grow louder, coupled with possible war crimes trials to begin next year, President George W. Bush may be thinking that South America would make a fine place to retire.

This and the blog at the link above are reporting that at least two sources, including Upsidedownworld and Prensa Latina, report rumors of a Bush family purchase of land in northern Paraguay.

Ahh, Paraguay. Land of fleeing Nazi war criminals, haven of the despised. Without this corrupt little banana republic, where could the evil rich hide?

An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region…Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

Another rumored land deal, this one involving the U.S. military, attracted the attention of Project Censored, which listed “U.S. Military in Paraguay” as one of its top 25 censored stories of 2007: “Five hundred U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay with planes, weapons, and ammunition in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction. Neighboring countries and human rights organizations are concerned that the massive air base at Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay is potential real estate for the U.S. military.”

This airbase is not far from the rich Bolivian gas fields.

We know there’s terrorist bases in South America—for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports say Iranian-backed Hizbullah have a presence, so taking over a big Paraguayan air base is a first step and EX-Pres. Bush would be right there to oversee things for Big Oil.

“The War On Terror” seems to be concentrated in oil-rich areas. How odd. Isn’t that odd? Don’t you think that’s odd? What a perfect place from which to attack terrorists, whether there are any or not.

Yep, I bet it’s getting too hot in Texas and a 100,000 acre ranch in Paraguay under the protection of our military and their government should guarantee his safety. No extradition either.

Are you looking at this? Stand back from the herd and stare at it. It’s a wolf.

A hat tip to Jordon for bringing this to my attention.

Oil prices are over $100 a barrel now, driving the Inflation Engine ever faster as commodity prices race to keep up with increasing costs of energy, raw materials, transportation and demands for higher wages to meet the increased cost of living.

The OPEC nations and other smaller producers like Venezuela see a decreased demand for oil in the Western Hemisphere, as winter warms to spring, and are increasing the price to maintain their high profits.

We, the sheep, will of course follow this with hardly a bleat. Ha ha, sheep joke: We won’t skip a bleat. Ha baaa ha. As our leaders run for the edge of the fiscal precipice we will faithfully follow. We will stand in line to have our wool shorn before the last winter freeze, trusting that we will not die of exposure. But if we do, hey, we’re only sheep.