Sweet Crude Week in Review Part II

This week I pulled three flats on the back wheel of my Benotto and had to resort to riding the Trek which sucked. 26 inch wheels suck, I'm over mountain bikes. fucking over them. Road bikes with 700 wheels are the ONLY WAY to ride on streets...Okay townies too....okay cruisers too.

And gas prices are on everyone's lips. Those weekend trips up to SF my friends like to take are getting too expensive. And folks are filling up their tanks only half way, resorting to Costco stations because gas is a little bit cheaper there. It makes me nervous knowing that the situation is only going to get worse and that most folks don't realize this is just the beginning of what James Howard Kunstler calls, "The Long Emergency."

Speaking of Costco, this week a doctor got arrested after brandishing a tire iron and confronting another motorist who cut him off at a Costco gas station.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9540726?source=most_viewed

I don't know which is worse - the fact that people are already acting desperate for fuel or that the pigs actually arrested a man for such behavior (as opposed to detaining him, or you know, just having a stern talk with him).

And half a world away, fuel protests have racked the governments of Spain, Portugal, and many parts of Asia.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9CB0C480-68A7-4380-BA0C-1BEDD1DCBA1D.htm

As a friend put it via email, "This is crazy, these protests are really effective. This is the only way to get the government, nay, the world to listen to your plight. You have to hit them where it hurts, it's all about money. Although these governments cannot control the actual rising in oil prices, it sounds like they can control how much it gets taxed. If more people mobilized in this country including myself, we could change many problems with this country."

Crazy? Shee-it, it's crazy to me to think that many of these strikes are union led and that the United States has one of the weakest labor movements of all industrialized nations. Americans ain't organized along labor lines, and we're going to pay dearly for it.

But at least one group still has the huevos to take a stand for what they believe in - the ruling class, and their political party, the Republicans. For the 2nd week in a row, the GOP minority in the Senate thwarted plans by the jackass Democrats to enact energy reform in general and tax the oil barons in particular.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/10/congress.oil.profits

You gotta hand it to the Grand Old Party for being consistent - they were dragged kicking & screaming during the desegregation struggles of the 1960s, and they're now being dragged kicking & screaming into the powering-down era of the 21st Century.