Amerika

So once upon a time, I was the dumb kid in a Complex Analysis Class that I needed to graduate with my Mathematics Degree. I could make like a submarine and resurface above “C” Level. Provided that I sat through a lecture my prof was giving on mapping rock strata using PDEs.

I sat there politely wondering who could possibly care enough about mapping rock strata to take the second derivative of a spherical harmonic in some elliptical PDE after a sounding device fired off a few vibrations? That C I pulled should have been a C-. The WSJ informs me: “Here’s your sign.”

A great struggle is unfolding in the world oil market. On one side are forces pushing to rebalance supply and demand; on the other, those pulling to recalibrate the business so that it operates at lower cost. That tension explains why the price keeps jumping toward $60 a barrel and then falling back near $40.

So what the Wise Old Doc was up to was determining anomalous densities within mineral formations. The less complex term for anomalous densities that someone nicely talked me through afterwards is “holes.” That hole encased in rock will sometimes have gas (probably methane) and other times have liquids. These liquids would tend to be some admixture of mineral water and petroleum. The easiest sort of rock formation to sound out, due to some complicated geological factors involving crystal structures and the physics of standing wave amplitudes traveling through a solid medium, is you guessed it: shale. Boy would that come in handy if you wanted to do something crazy and sick like hydrocarbon fracturing. And that had a so what attached I was too young and too dumb to possibly fathom back in the day.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how striking this is. The oil industry is more than 150 years old, and oil ‘should’ be getting more expensive to find and to pump, not less. The most obvious oil fields should have been found first, and the most promising wells dug long ago. We should now be living in a world of diminishing returns, with more and more money chasing less and less oil. It was this prospect that led so many doom and gloom thinkers in the 20th century to agonize over ideas like “peak oil”.

So it’s time to declare victory, whip it out and utter a sigh of contentment as we spray forth our excess alcoholic beverage after-product on the grave of Thomas Malthus. It’s too bad Gail The Actuary shut down The Oil Drum before we could troll the poor dearie for next prediction of when peak oil would have us queueing up our rickshaws at Gate 9^* to get on the arsenal. Well, not so fast Jim Rico.

One man’s success is often another one’s failure. Economic, scientific or social progress is achieved through smashing cartels, consensus, or progressivism. Any way you term it, this involves tearing down a control point where parasites charge you a toll to move forward. These parasites are not happy when you take the worm pill. They will fight you to prevent you from stripping them of sustenance that they cannot produce for themselves.

Now a good Alt-Righter should almost reflexively think “Tough sh!t!” Jesus once sardonically remarked. “They have their reward.” This was not meant as a complement. But then again, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. If it had been anyone other than Jesus, the moneychangers,^** would have given him his reward — good and hard. You and I don’t operate high enough in the Stratosphere to be beyond their petty and worldly vengeance.

And then it gets more complex, like the aforementioned PDEs I couldn’t even really follow past the initial templates. As Giovanni Donatto puts it: The keys to Anglo success are Picky Women, Prudery and Snobbery. Cut the price of transport in half, and I’m over in Japan dating a lady with twice my IQ. She can explain those PDEs to me^*** in the sexiest voice imaginable. The keys to White Boy success are blown to flinders to the personal betterment of your typical single, young White Boy with a degree in Applied Math.

So you have to change or die. To get ahead, something has to be left behind. Choose wisely what gets left behind. Make sure you won’t need it sometime later. It will probably be killed. Once the switch is thrown, it can’t be undone. There was no unbombing of Hiroshima. The SJWs will discover there is no disconnecting or unprogramming the Internet. The SWPLs, Proggies and Cucks will discover you can’t retroactively unelect #PresidentTrump. We here in Amerika will discover you can’t quite make it back home to the America of Mayberry (even if DJT unimmigrates a few hundred thousand illegals and H1B Visa Holders).

So what do? We’re as frakked as I was the night before the Complex Analysis final and we’re gonna have to deal with it. Our future is going to massively change. Vested interests that have a stake in preventing oil from being plentiful and human movement from being easy and cheap will fight this tooth and nail when they figure out the 2nd and 3rd order implications. It was doable. It was probably necessary if you don’t like an Al Quaeda or an ISIS with more disposable income than the US Treasury. You will have to adjust to the end of another scarcity. Get ready.

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^* — Inside joke from my neck of the woods.

^** — The (((Banksters))) of their day.

^*** — If she hasn’t tossed me out on the tiles for caring what a PDE is.

Tags: change, energy, oil