It wasn't Sadam nor democracy nor WMD's. It was oil all along. Reminds me of the film, "Mad Max".

There was a long time early on in this administration when we neither saw nor heard from Cheney. I suspected then that he was carefully mapping out Iraq for oil and cutting the slices just a little thicker for his buddies.

Hey, how about those NO BID contracts, again?





Read it here or at WaPo.

http://patterns2.blogspot.com/

I'm sure there's no connection to the fact that I paid $4.20/gal. today (in Texas!)--nah, they wouldn't do anything to make sure that right when they're getting these contracts signed, the public will be more interested in lower oil prices than in the fact that they have killed 4,102 Americans and between 85,000 and 92,000 Iraqis to get those contracts.

There was some MSM saying before the invasion that it would bring the price of oil down.

There are some on the net who say the deal is a huge ripoff of Iraq now.

We can make biodiesel out of hemp, along with lots of other stuff like plastics, paper and cloths. It need not be explained how that could help everyone.

A nice young woman I work with pointed out that you get better gas milage if your tank is half full, because of the weight of the gas.

And you can get more gas in your tank if you buy at the coolest time of day. Something about the molecules being more dense.

We're not allowed to grow hemp, cuz they're afraid we'll smoke it.

Isn't price typically a supply and demand type of thang?

Demand for gas is going down in the US, ergo the price should be going down, eh?

Wait......that must be wrong.


Only Larry or Arnie could straighten something like this out.

Demand also includes futures trading, and that's what drove gas prices up this spring and is keeping them there. At least, that's what all the Western governments--except our administration--say.

We ARE in trouble!

"We're not allowed to grow hemp, cuz they're afraid we'll smoke it."

Oh, no, not THAT!
And if we make ethenol we'll drink that, too.
It's easy to do, though-
back in the early '70s I was building perhaps the first earth-sheltered home in North Dakota and I used my 3/4 ton Chev truck HARD hauling water, concrete blocks, bags of cement, etc, etc....
on ethenol I made for FREE, using spoiled grain the farmers cleaned out of the bottoms of their silos. Mother Earth (the magazine) taught me how.
It was easy, too, until the autumn hail that destroyed my solar still.
Don't believe the nay-sayers who tell you that you must make costly vehicle modifications. I just dumped it in the tank and turned the key!

You want to SMOKE one of my chooks??????!!!!!!

I don't know what a chook is
but you bring it in here and i'll smoke it!

*grin*

Shas, I'm an AmerAussie living in Australia for now. Here we call chickens Chooks! If you go to the Blunderboard and then to the Vale Blundechook thread starting at page one, you can read a little about the BlunderChooks. (thats if it interests you)

I just had some smoked Chook for lunch. But don't tell the BlunderChooks or we could have something nasty happening here. Remember, chooks were once Raptors!

Louise, good morning

I was in my thirties, attending university
(between the Vietnam War,
the Soviets with the Big Button,
and the imminent Rapture and Apocalypse
it hardly seemed worth while in the 1970s
to spend several years going to school).
Except for my years of living on the street
I had lived most of my life in the sticks
practicing Mother Earth-style self-sufficiency.
(I vividly remember discovering The Mother Earth News:
I had had no idea I was part of a popular movement!)

We raised all sorts of vegetable crops, of course,
as well as an assortment of livestock
for milk, meat, eggs, leather, etc.
Lacking electricity, we canned and dried
and smoked various foods for storage.

This is all background for my little story:

So I'm in my 30s, attending university
with all these 18 to 23 year old city kids, right?
This was in the Vancouver area,
well-known for a rich ethnic diversity
(if the USA is the world's Melting Pot
Canada must be the world's Tossed Salad.
Immigrants tend to practice their language
and old-world customs here to a large extent).
The topic had turned to unexpected foods,
one of the students telling of catching ("catching"?)
sea slugs and sea cucumbers to dry for food.
I thought I'd tell them about making jerky from goats
and I began with "I jerked a goat once in Montana.."
And that's about as far as I got.
Quicker than you'd imagine I found myself sitting all alone
at a large table in the middle of the cafeteria.

Loved Mother Earth News. A neighbour used to give me his copies to read (this was thirty years ago) We have quite a few of those type of mags here in Oz now. Grassroots, Warm Earth, Earth Mother and several others.

I grew up in Ore. We used to go camping up in B.C. in summer. Nothing beats the Pacfic Northwest!

My great grand parents had a ranch in Montana, grew alfalfa and bred horses. They had a goat, didn't "jerk" it but but my Gramma killed it by feeding it TAFFY! Then there is the thing that happened to the ranch Chickens (I'll tell you about it sometime soon, it is part of our family folklore!.)..........she left the ranch and moved back to Silverton, Ore. She was more of a town than country gal! If she had been more like
me I could have maybe been living on a ranch in Montana now!!

oops gettin a bit off target here, sorry Larnie, meanwhile back in Iraq.