Why Brazil’s Find Doesn’t Matter

The find: “On Nov. 8, Brazil’s state-controlled oil firm Petrobras confirmed the finding of huge oil reserves that could hold up to 8 billion barrels of light crude in the Tupi fields, off Brazil’s southeastern coast.” “Tupi is the world’s biggest oil find since a 12 billion-barrel Kazakh field was discovered in 2000, and the largest ever in deep waters.” “Perhaps more important, Petrobras believes Tupi may be Brazil’s first of several new ‘elephants,’ an industry term for outsize fields of more than 1 billion barrels.”

Ok, it does matter. It’s a huge find for Brazil that will make the nation a major oil exporter for years to come, especially given their booming ethanol industry. It is significant in a world where every year another nation peaks in production or switches from net exporter to net importer. Every drop counts.

Ethanol Scam: Political Boondoggle

Rolling Stone is not the height of American journalism, but I’ll take justification that I’m not crazy wherever I can get it. Kudos to them for use of the word boondoggle. I posted my rant against ethanol on July 20th, beating out Rolling Stone by 4 days. Blatant plagiarism, and I am currently considering my options vis-a-vis legal action. Being highly knowledgeable about the subject, I noticed several liberties taken by the writer. Nothing that was outright dishonest, but perhaps over-simplified. It’s easy to forget how much is hidden under the surface with any complex subject.

Following is a few bits and pieces of the RS article and, I can only imagine, my own commentary. “This is not just hype — it’s dangerous, delusional bullshit.” Certainly my type of journalism.

Invest in Transcendence

[Back without popular demand. I stand by my predictions, except I am shaky on McCain being the next president. At the time, I assumed a Republican would win yet again (Democrats were.. are?.. in complete disarray), and McCain felt like a front-runner.]

Step into my lab and lets take a whirl around some of the more obscure and bizarre areas of my research. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so don’t be alarmed by sudden forks in consciousness; it comes with the territory. Over here we have Terrance McKenna’s Novelty Theory, which states that time is a fractal wave of increasing novelty – newness, increasing complexity, and dynamic change. McKenna’s data is derived from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching that shows, when mapped, moments of increasing and decreasing novelty in the world. Crackpot enough? Well novelty increases exponentially despite temporary setbacks, and it is set to culminate on December 21, 2012. At this limit of infinite novelty, “anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.” Sign me up for some of that. How the code to explain novelty over time is trapped in the I Ching has stumped far greater mathematicians than I, but the argument makes sense intuitively: the world is going to end soon. Now it’s real easy to get down on the harbinger of the apocalypse; “Oh, you see that line behind you stretching a million men long across the breadth of human history? Yeah, they got here first, and I’m still alive… *jazz hands*.” Just who were these cult leaders and non-prophet organizations? How do I know that their projections were subject to the same rigorous inspection and methodology behind mine? I’m classically trained in apocryphal apocalyptic analysis. They didn’t even have universities in the Paleolithic period. Oh, if only there was some independent verification of the importance of 2012…