Sipsey Street Irregulars: "The collapse in the price of oil is a challenge to the old world order."

Thursday, December 31, 2015

"The collapse in the price of oil is a challenge to the old world order."

The West will be hoping that the existing Gulf regimes aren’t replaced by something worse, while also hoping that the collapse in the price of oil will reduce flows of cash to extremist Wahhabi and Salafist groups around the world. If radical Islamist terror groups end up being the biggest losers, the collapse in the oil price could yet end up achieving more than sanctions or Western military intervention ever could; but a successful uprising in somewhere like Saudi could also risk turning a bad situation into a catastrophe. . .

As for Scotland, the nationalist electorate will eventually have to wake up to the new reality of a world awash with oil. The SNP’s plans for independence didn’t even come close to adding up even when the price of Brent crude was over $100 last year.

At current prices and with output sliding, an independent Scotland that sought to retain the NHS and the welfare state would face immediate bankruptcy.

Forget about politics and slick campaigns: if anything keeps the UK together over the next few years, it will be cheap oil and the latest, abject failure of Malthusianism, one of the most wrong-headed ideologies of the past 200 years.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Time to face it. Oil really is everywhere all over the planet. The Saudis have known it for a very long time, so have their buttboy American dhimmis. The only way to keep the dhimmi status alive was to convince people that ....wait for it..... drilling for oil was killing the planet. Global warming. Ahem.

Enough is enough. The American model of using oil to lubricate the economic engine, rather than the muslim model of oil BEING the engine, has once again proven to be the right way to go.

Now, lets put our drills in the ground, on the white house lawn if need be, and tell the muslims to go ahead and eat their oil.

Sorry about their luck.; December 31, 2015 at 8:52 PM
Anonymous said...: Oh, this writer is good! He tries demonizing the Malthusian/Fabian Socialist/Darwinian/Globalist plans and mindset by using Malthusian/Fabian Socialist/Darwinian/Globalist arguments.According to him we're all going to limit ourselves in the area of childbirth to conform to the "Brave New World" scenario of Aldous Huxley (Brother of UNESCO head Julian Huxley). And he cleverly sneaks in the idea that GMO's, (although he never uses that term, but certainly alludes to it) and chemical fertilizers are the great saviors in feeding mankind; forgetting to mention that they change genetics far into the future (like maybe forever) and feed plants through chemicals that end up offering absolutely no nutritional value at all. Eating the food packaging might offer the same nutrition as the product itself. And then he champions Globalism while beating the daylights out of nationalism by using the example of Scotland, because, he says, they would go bankrupt from their socialist policies if they went independent from the UK. That right there proves that socialism keeps you locked into a serfdom that the people don't want but now have no way of escaping! Like a heroin dealer keeping someone locked in their basement, shooting them up with heroin everyday for two weeks, and then saying the guy could have left anytime he wanted to - if he wasn't addicted to heroin.-- By this point I've forgotten other nuances of this writers brainwashing techniques, but I will go back and read him again; if for no reason other than a good laugh.. And BTW: Does anyone else see through this guys smoke-screen, or is it only me?; January 1, 2016 at 4:53 AM
Chiu ChunLing said...: "At the same time, the slowdown in China has reduced demand for energy."

The slowdown isn't just in China. While it is true that improved technology can increase exploitable energy supplies, this only happens when the price is increasing over the long-term. The dramatic collapse of oil is partly attributable to improved extraction technology, which by itself should only have caused prices to stabilize at a reduced rate of increase. The rest of the collapse is the result of reduced real demand, which has fallen far below levels on which the investment in new technology was predicated.

It isn't just oil that is collapsing dramatically, but nearly all raw materials. This cannot be the result of improved extraction technology in so many divergent fields at once without affecting manufactured goods even more dramatically (a general technology improvement would affect goods subject to more processing multiple times, rather than only at extraction). That raw materials are dropping in price while consumer goods increase in price can only mean that the manufacturing capacity is not growing in line with demand for goods or supply of materials.

And, looking at the numbers for manufacturing, we can see this is obviously true. Raw materials have seen increases in supply due to improved technology, but the drop in demand has been far greater. In essence, the real economy has already collapsed and the only people making money anymore are the ones involved in conjuring it into virtual existence by lending us what they never actually had.

Historically, this kind of situation always ends badly.; January 1, 2016 at 7:11 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Thursday, December 31, 2015

"The collapse in the price of oil is a challenge to the old world order."

3 comments:

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