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44 comments on Understanding the oil patch

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AngryChimp on November 19, 2005 - 3:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
We did this to ourselves but there really are Darth Vader types out there who benefit from the way it is.

No doubt!!  If you would like to read a book that explains how oil politics and the "Seven Sisters" oil cartels have shaped this world since WWI read: "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics" by William Engdahl.
http://tinyurl.com/7artg

==AC

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wkwillis on November 20, 2005 - 5:06am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Goralski's "Oil and War" covers the military consequences of control of oil during WWII, without the conspiracy theories. Recommended.
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Bigelow on November 20, 2005 - 11:49am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Coincidence theory is the flip side of conspiracy theory.
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step back on November 20, 2005 - 1:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Coincidence ... is the flip side of conspiracy

No it is not.

Random stuff happens all the time.
Containment of a secret almost never happens.
Successful conspiracy is a rare bird.
Tom-foolery is a pigeon on every door step.

We as humans are wired to see "patterns" in the chaos. We are predisposed to believe in Intelligent Design. If something happened, then there has to be a "reason" for it, a conspiracy, a cabal. Surely a bunch of evil, evil demons gathered in a smoke-filled room and planned this all out. ["This" being: Iraq, Peak Oil, Bird Flu, 9/11, Assassination of JFK, ..., you name it.]

In truth, much of what we see in the world is a tangled web that "evolves" itself from randomness. It seems like a pattern. In fact it is simply a byproduct of our many thoughtless and foolish mis-steps; our inability to see beyond the horizon of our own selfish and immediate desires.

Do you honestly think Cheney & boy blunder "planned" the Iraq fiasco? More likely than not, they came into office as such simpletons that they did not realize they had to plan and coordinate against an Iraq happening.

This was not "the gang that couldn't shoot straight".
This was the gang that didn't know to keep a fire extiguisher near the fireplace. Now the whole house is burning down. And all they wanted was to make things a little warmer and comfier for their ideaological leanings. Do you know how to spell "backfire"?

Peak Oil is kind of the same thing.
No one "planned" for it to happen.
But then again, no one is bringing the fire extiguisher over to our party house to help us put our own fossil fuelish fire out. You know, the one that is burning down our whole planet. (Can you spell "Global Warming"? Shrub Wonder (aka Boy Blunder) can't. His Intelligently Designed brain does not allow for such hard hard thoughts.)

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Bigelow on November 20, 2005 - 3:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Coincidence ... is the flip side of conspiracy
No it is not.

Yes it is when used by talking heads in a `marketing' way to obscure the inconvenient facts of a particular story; which is very often how it is derisively used.

That off my chest, Life is all random coincidence, and we pay selective attention.

Regarding underestimating Cheney & boy blunder I defer to:
"'White House in Chaos' & Other Utter Horseshit"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-gilroy/white-house-in-chaos-_b_10159.html

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Twilight on November 20, 2005 - 9:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Do you honestly think Cheney & boy blunder "planned" the Iraq fiasco?

Well, they didn't expect it to be a fiasco, but they did plan it.  Hell, they published the plan.  Maybe it's just a coincidence that what they've done and what was published in the PNAC document match so completely.  Personally, when someone says they're gonna do something, and then they do, it's more than a coincidence.  I'm hoping that we'll get to find out at least some of what happened in Cheney's energy task force, and then we'll be better able to judge conspiracy from collusion from coincidence.  

Also, I believe that information abhors a vacuum, and nothing creates a vacuum better than a really unbelievable official story (single bullet theory anyone?), and a lack of trust in those dishing out the BS.  If you know you're being lied to, then you have to try to figure out your own explanation.

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AngryChimp on November 21, 2005 - 4:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"But it was shocking to me that the secretary of defense would tell the Army how to fight. He doesn't know how to fight; he has no business telling them. It's completely within civilian authority to tell you where to fight, what our major objective is, but it is absolutely no one's business but uniformed military to tell you how to do the job. To me, it was astonishing that Rumsfeld would presume to tell four-star generals, in the Army thirty-five years, how to do their jobs.

Now here's another thing that Rumsfeld did. As he was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know."
~Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy

When I was commander of CENTCOM, we had a plan for an invasion of Iraq, and it had specific numbers in it. We wanted to go in there with 350,000 to 380,000 troops. You didn't need that many people to defeat the Republican Guard, but you needed them for the aftermath. We knew that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had completely uprooted an authoritarian government and would need to freeze the situation: retain control, retain order, provide security, seal the borders to keep terrorists from coming in.

When I left in 2000, General Franks took over. Franks was my ground-component commander, so he was well aware of the plan. He had participated in it; those were the numbers he wanted. So what happened between him and Rumsfeld and why those numbers got altered, I don't know, because when we went in we used only 140,000 troops, even though General Eric Shinseki, the army commander, asked for the original number.
~Gen. Anthony Zinni

"Well, they didn't expect it to be a fiasco"

I wouldn't be so sure of that.  They deliberately sent 1/3 the troops that was needed to do the job and picked units that had lower degrees of readiness, "for reasons we don't know."  Well if you understand the globalist you can understand the game.  If they would have sent 400,000 troops toppled Saddam in a week and stabilized the country in a year or so what would be our options?   We would force to leave the country just like his NWO father 15 years ago.  What better way to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq and plunder their resources under the guise of "incompetence".  Bush is expendable to the globalist.  When he is done he will be replaced by another cast of characters that will follow the same game plan.  All that matters is we keep a permanent troop presence in the heart of the golden triangle.

The military plans "crazy" things all the time:
http://tinyurl.com/64r7m

Bush is there for a reason.  He is the "incompetent dope" so it seems plausible that we could screw up this bad in Iraq while Cheney sits in his bunker and carries out the globalist plan with the real powers that be.
==AC

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LevinK on November 21, 2005 - 1:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Regarding the information from the link: let me just express my doubts that this plans finally got implemented in newer times. Who knows probably we'll find out in another 40 years... but of course nobody will care then as nobody cares now.
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step back on November 21, 2005 - 7:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I guess today's news story blows the "there are no conspiracies" theory out of the water:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/21/scanlon.plea/index.html

Moreover, I think this one involves environmental groups and Indian tribes who gave donations for environmental causes

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AngryChimp on November 20, 2005 - 4:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The individuals participating at TOD seems to consist of a group of rather educated people.  PhDs, engineers, heads of industry and such.  Let's call them "smart" people.  There is nothing wrong with this, of course, especially when the purpose of this site is for ANALYZING energy issues.  But there is a small problem here.  As soon as somebody brings up a topic that doesn't quite fit in the established view of events it is immediately labeled "CONSPIRACY".  These "smart" people should realize that the world "conspiracy" is a FRAME (http://tinyurl.com/sm0y).  Someone has already preprogrammed a conceptual picture with a word.  That is why as soon as somebody mentions "conspiracy" most peoples minds shut it out as "silliness" or just random coincidence.  They do not have the "wiring' to understand the bigger picture.

Another thing that interests me about "smart" people is that scam and con artists around the world agree the easiest target for their scams are "smart" people.  The more educated the better.  The reason being they think they are too smart to be scammed so they find it IMPOSSIBLE that they could be taken without their knowledge.  That is why the word "conspiracy" does not settle well with so called "smart" people.  If there was an actual world wide conspiracy going on, that they themselves knew absolutely nothing about, they would have to admit to themselves that they are not as smart as they think they are. After all the "official" story line on 9/11 is just a "conspiracy" theory put forth by the government except they can ignore the laws of physics when they explain how three steel framed structures collapsed into their own footprints that day from "fire".  http://tinyurl.com/7zf9o

IMHO you should not be shooting things down as "conspiracy" unless you at least read Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time".  Of course we are the Tragedy and the intellectual elite are the hope for mankind from Quigley's elitist perspective.  If you read it and still think there is no "conspiracy" by the banks and oil companies I salute you.

http://tinyurl.com/8p2nb.

Regards,
==AC

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step back on November 20, 2005 - 7:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The general understanding of "conspiracy" is a smoke filled room with all the players being there and expressly mouthing off the duties of each member in the conspiracy.

I think the words you are looking for are more along the line of "tacit collusion". That's where there are winks and nods between various people, but nothing is expressed out loud.

If you and I own gas stations across the street from each other and one day I see you raising prices and looking for a wink and nod from me -well we haven't said anything, but there was collusion.

None of the "smart" people are saying collusions don't happen. I think they are saying it would be kind of dumb to involve yourself in an outright "conspiracy" when you can achieve similar results with silent collusions.

Keeping a "secret" is hard hard work.
Hell, look at Plame-gate (the White House CIA outing for you nonAmerican readers of TOD).
Look at Cheney's problem with keeping his 2001 energy meeting under wraps.

It is so much easier to do stuff if there is no "secret" and you simply nod and wink in response to the nods and winks from other members of your industry.

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AngryChimp on November 20, 2005 - 8:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
No No No.  I'm thinking of real conspiracies. Like for example the fact that the VAST MAJORITY of the country BELIEVES the Federal Reserve is actually part of the federal government and is controlled by the federal government. In actuality it was a coup by international bankers to wrestle control of the government's ability to print money away from the "people" and place it into the hands of a private banking cartel.  In turn, handing over control of the country's economy to a private group of international banking families.  Now that's conspiracy!!  Come to think of it, they may have been smoking cigars when Morgan and his friends hatched the plot at Jekyll Island.  I'll have to look it up ;-)

==AC

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."
- James Madison, 4th US President

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
- James A. Garfield, 20th US President

A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men".
- Woodrow Wilson, 28th US President

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LevinK on November 21, 2005 - 1:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
After some time you'd probably get to know your neighbour and there will not be a need for nods and winks.

Basicly I think you are both right (and both wrong)... There are numbers of more or less strongly coupled circles which make more or less good plans to protect their collective interests. Whether you call these plans conspiracies is just a matter of taste; personally I object the predefined negative load of this word. When you think of it any enterprise (legal or not) started in some room full of smoke. Of course on a larger scale conspiracies that are against the rules of life are doomed in the long term... But look at the Russian revolution - their long term turned to be 70 years and maybe 70 more for the country to recover from it.

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