Oil prices: Is conflict in the Middle East to blame or is global demand simply outpacing supply? Either way we’re running out of oil, and it spells bad news for the world economy. Here in King County, trucker spends $1 Grand to fill up his diesel tank.
And she’s staying at the Green Tortoise in Galway. Queen plans first visit to Ireland by an English monarch since independence. Peace progress in Northern Ireland makes visit possible.
Get back to work, perezosa! 20 year old Mexican chief of police and young mother hasn’t been seen at work in three days. Many fear the worst, but others believe she may have fled to Texas.
February unemployment: 8.9 percent and falling. Last month U.S. employers added 192,000 jobs in the most promising employment trend since recession began.
Unemployment falling, but so are wages. Low-income jobs (that pay $9.01 to $12.91 per hour) growing fastest. Workers sacrificing higher wages to stay employed, and unemployed workers settling for less.
Kids! You know I love ‘em: Parents who say they feel blessed to have kids are lying to themselves a new study suggests.
Federal grants, technology investment, and young talented teachers: Reasons for Miami Central High School’s turnaround and Pres. Obama’s visit.
(Rolls eyes): SPD braces for more anarchist rampage this weekend. Anarchist website says “Our intention as anarchists is purely conflictional. We intend to create the space for agitation and attack.”
Your out-of-state gay marriage: Now also a Washington State fake marriage domestic partnership. Olympia law makers vote to recognize the out-of-state same-sex marriages of Washington visitors.
Local gal hits the big time: Jinkx Monsoon on Funny or Die.
Oil prices are not being affected by the middle east no matter how much the MSM wants you to think that. Libya only accounts to 1% of the oil used and for the past several months the major oil companies have been building up huge supplies of oil..yeah they have a glut of oil and are now using this crisis to drive up prices.
It’s called gaming the market because most people don’t pay attention to what’s going on.
Re: Oil: Yes, and yes…but not, as Cato rightly says, because the pipeline just got turned off. Here in oil-rich Alberta, prices fluctuate all the time, whether due to market panic, or even just for a holiday weekend, even though our supply is steady. But, as far as global decline, well duh. The oil that’s coming from our province is hard to extract, expensive to process, and causing untold environmental damage, and of course it just gets worse every year, being on the downhill side of the slope now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
The trucker should be dumping his money into the market, not his tank. Chevron and Exxon-Mobil stocks are up 20-25% in the past three months.
As a non-parent who plans on never having kids, I’m kind of disappointed with that article, which read much more like an opinion piece of someone desperately trying to justify their decision not to procreate. Also, the study itself seems a bit suspect.
Thanks, raindrop. Link corrected and link to Washington recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages added.
Full disclosure: I run a piss-ant small news site that gets all excited and shit about links from Slog.
How come you guys only turn to big media for coverage of world + Seattle affairs?
@4 Yep, if it’s one thing that the religious nut-jobs, bigots & mouth breathers who think science is a matter of “belief” can agree on, it’s that Obama is a big pooper-head that never lets anyone have any fun.
@9, I love your blog – it can report rings around the Stranger on neighborhood activity its own staff is much too easily distracted to capture. I wonder why they don’t just link to your work more – embarrassment?
Canuck! Good morning!
@10, and that wasn’t the only reason I had to just vote “die” for the first time ever. I’m sure everyone involved is wonderful and has terrific spirit, and there were four great lines spread over the two parts, but overall it’s a shrug. The site must’ve thought, well, we don’t have many drag clips, and they do mention Portland right away, so why not post it!
In brighter news. Carnival in Rio is kicking off. My Brazilian boyfriends sent me this clip of the dance they’re rehearsing in my honor to try to get me to fly down this year, but my sister is having a potluck on Wednesday night so I can’t get away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXFJK5Yul…
Well, I’d hop on a plane for Rio in a heartbeat. Except, um, Urgutha and I are getting together in about an hour to see who can drink the most. These things usually don’t end well.
@14,
My liver is already beginning to complain. I’m not sure it ever recovered from last time.
Mr. Jameson, and perhaps Mr. Walker, if I’m feeling like it, will proceed to beat the hell out of me in about a half hour.
See you there!
Happy Saturday, gus! What, you’re choosing green bean casserole over waxed Brazilians?? Sheesh. Can you at least promise me you’ll bust a few of those elbow-to-knee moves in the privacy of your own kitchen?
If they want to “create the space for agitation and attack”, they are nihilists, not anarchists. Dumbasses.
Canuck, I promise I will try the dance at my sister’s potluck, to show off while we’re munching one goddam gluten-free dessert or other. (And the real reason I’m not able to visit my lovelies in Brazil is concern over my carbon footprint…)
I hesitate to even bother typing this, because it makes just as much sense as anything else the bigots come up with –
but how on earth is recognizing out of state marriages as dp’s any closer to “recognizing gay marriage in WA”
than not? Doesn’t it just boil down to slightly less paperwork?
The original law isn’t prohibiting people with out-of-state marriages from getting domestic partnerships in WA, it’s just not linking the two. No one’s getting fake-married or real-married who wasn’t able to before.
Also, is this actually law yet? Link says it goes to the Senate – is there any worry for it there?
What about same-sex marriages from other countries? Do those get recognized as DPs in the state too?
gus…Gluten-free dessert, or as we call it in Alberta, fruit. Chocolate ganache over a caramel brownie base, from a tattered issue of Gourmet circa 1988…sigh, favourite ever. I hope your sister isn’t also a vegan, sweetie, there’s only so much sacrifice one should have to make…
In other news, SPD attack defenseless students downtown in front of crowded theatre.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SegbBl9zY…
@4
We can open US oil taps as wide as we want, but it won’t do much good. The only way to achieve anything resembling “energy independence” is to reduce consumption. Besides, any benefit would disappear very quickly: demand is increasing at a much more healthy rate than supply. It’s a game that we have absolutely no chance of winning long term.
However, politics are much easier than dealing with energy reality, thus the resistance towards anything that might actually ameliorate the coming crisis.
#25 Production is not the problem (yet). The answers lie in how we efficiently utilize what is available, not producing more in exceedingly more reckless manners just to satisfy our casual demands.
2 years ago I was making a salary equivalent to $52/hour. Today I’m preparing to take a job for $12 just to stay in my industry.
UNEMPLOYMENT IS DOWN!
THE ECONOMY IS RECOVERING!
ugh, i guess i’ll die because that jinkx shit was NOT funny.
Hey guys, the IGBP site now has a donation option! For $25 you can have them donate a book to a school…great, huh?
Bush tax cuts are saving the economy!
Typographic whine: There’s something wrong with “$1 Grand.” It just doesn’t read right. Maybe because it’s redundant, a Grand in this context meaning “a thousand bucks.” Alternatively, G is used as either an abbreviation for a thousand, or when pronounced, as short for a Grand. So, these would be more correct:
a) $1K
b) a Grand (capitalization optional)
c) a G
d) $1G
@25
No. Supply is declining every year. The methods for slowing that decline will require ever more of energy and environmental degradation as time goes on. The chances of some miracle oil supply appearing is slim. All the big fields of the 20th century are producing at a fraction of their peak production.
We can’t just use all the oil we want forever. It’s not going to run out any time soon, but any rational society would conclude that the era of infinite cheap energy is over, or at least will be over in a few years.
Even the US military realizes this. They use gigantic quantities of oil and are actively trying to figure out ways to reduce their demand.
@32, you’re absolutely right. But the story’s fishier than that.
First of all, he didn’t spend a grand, he spend $988.80. Yeah, that’s a lot — but that’s less than $100 more than he paid the last time he filled up, by my reckoning. So it’s more, but it’s not like it suddenly doubled or tripled. It costs a lot to gas up a big rig, and it always has. He was paying more thirty years ago, if you adjust for inflation.
There are lots of reasons to stop burning fossil fuels, and we should work towards that. However, the U.S. has massive, massive amounts of reserves in the form of oil sands and oil shale. The Green River formation in Utah and portions of the bordering states, supposedly has more than twice the amount of the entire world’s proven oil well reserves. If we decide we don’t care about the collateral damage to the world’s climate from unsequestering all that carbon (I happen to), and we don’t care about the ecology of Utah (I personally don’t), a thorough raping of the Utah landscape, air, and water would yield us all the energy we need for the next couple of centuries at the current rate of consumption.
I <3 Jinkx. So Much.
The puget sound anarchists website reads “Our intention as anarchists, is purely conflictual in nature.” Even Glenn Beck got that part right. But the slog makes it “conflictional,” because the local TV news dunce couldn’t pronounce the word. You didn’t even look at the article you thought you were quoting. Good reporting.