Rhinocrisy

ExxonMobil posted fourth-quarter profits of $10.7 billion.

Last quarter, you may recall that they posted profits of $9.9 billion, which was the record at that time. But these heady times we’re living in won’t sit still for a period as long as several months. Hah! The very idea. So we have a new record. The king is dead. Long live the king!

Some of you might find it alarming that humongous oil companies have essentially got the rest of the world hostage, at barrel-point, or held over a barrel, and other puns as well. We don’t even have to draw a diagram, here. Oil price high. Consumer pay through nose. Oil company make out like bandit.^* It’s pretty clear that oil companies are essentially robbing oil consumers blind.

So why should we let them do this? If only oil executives would descend from their board-rooms and bathe us in the effulgence of their wisdom! Fortunately for us, the U.S. Senate recently had hearings on this exact subject (although oil executives apparently aren’t effulgent so much as oppugnant).

Therein, execs do a lot of whining, complaining about environmental regulation, how they can’t drill everywhere they want to, limited access to the best oil fields, environmental regulation, Russia causing the price of oil to be low for several years, and environmental regulation. (I’m not exaggerating about the environmental regulation!) Also lots of fulminating about the free market and how it should be left to do its own thing.

This is balls. Most of the increased cost of gasoline is explained by one factor, and one factor alone: oil price. Quoth the head of the FTC:

The vast majority of the Commission’s investigations and studies have revealed market factors as the primary drivers of both price increases and price spikes. … The world price of crude oil, a commodity that is traded on world markets, is the most important factor in the price of gasoline in the United States and all other markets.

Despite all the complaints of oil executives, despite their grumbling about what a difficult, technical industry petroleum production is and how long the investment cycle is, the fact is, their high profits bear absolutely NO RELATION AT ALL to the high costs they may or may not be incurring. They do not deserve high profits because of unusual circumstances that required much more of them. Their high profits come only because they are fortunate enough to be standing in the right spot at a particular historical juncture.

I thought this quote (ironically) said it best:

“If it’s Google, no one asks about the profits because they’re too busy buying the stock,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, associate director of the energy program at Rice University. “Exxon is different. We have these emotional feelings related to gasoline because there’s no readily available substitute.”

Sorry, Amy - that’s not an emotional reaction. When someone exploits their position of dominance and the inflexibility of the market they are in to make tons of cash, that’s just robbery. We don’t tolerate it from monopolists - why should we tolerate it from the oil industry as a whole?

I won’t suggest that price controls should be put in place. It would be essentially impossible to control the price of crude. Actually, I don’t think there’s really anything constructive that can be done about this situation (short of repeating tropes about alternative energy sources). This is just capitalism, plain and simple. Some get rich. Others watch.

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^* Who, I am told, use plenty of tongue.

Wow, a coca grower as drug czar. That’s pretty wild. Almost as wild as an anti-government activist as president. Pretty soon you’ll have someone who hates the U.N. nominated as U.N. ambassador of the institution’s host country! Nah, it’ll never come to that.

I began work at a high-paying corporate job. There, I get to meet the kind of people who are attracted to high-paying corporate jobs. Today, one of them taught me several facts about the world. It was remarkable to learn so much from one young man.

• It’s harder for a rich person to lose a bit of comfort than for a poor person to remain totally uncomfortable. “What you don’t know you don’t miss.”
• Converting to a single-payer health insurance plan in the United States would be a logistical nightmare — a bigger one, apparently, than creating Medical Savings Accounts, which we happen to have as a pre-tax perk at this job. (Not to mention that it would be a bigger ordeal than building the biggest, fastest highway system in the world — but don’t get me started on the Futurist miracle of the Interstates.)
• Increased abortion of females in China and India will make the countries more warlike, as societies led by males are more warlike.

And from another, older man: the economy is doing great.

The stage-fright of seeing us nominated for an award (an award! for a blargh!) left me momentarily tongue-tied. Then I checked the access logs and saw that our newfound fame had so far failed to deliver its intimated deluge of readers. So with that, back to the fun.

So some anonymous do-gooder has apparently nominated us for the category of “Most Deserving of Wider Recognition“^* in the 2005 Koufax Awards. We are there along with some 300-other blogs, including the definitely deserving Nur al-Cubicle, Pinko Feminist Hellcat, and Yep, Another Goddamn Blog, all of whom are capable of writing longer paragraphs than I am. Unlikely indeed that this humble blog should rise to the top of this stack, but I won’t complain if we do. Perhaps we can help the cause along by increasing our buoyancy - hot air rises! We will begin now. “Harumph, harumph! Capitalism! Destruction of the earth! Et cetera, et cetera. Something about animals!”

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^* This category reminds me of one we had in our Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby^†, “Most Kid-like Construction”, which I used to win every year because I was the only kid who actually made my own damn racer.
^† A Pinewood Derby is where you hand out a bunch of blocks of wood and a set of wheels to several hundred kids. They take them home to their engineer dads, who craft the blocks of wood into aerodynamically perfect, forward-weighted, graphite-lubed racing machines. (Including spoilers. I am not shitting you.) Then everyone races their cars down a ramp, and I lose.

Sorry for the long delay in updating that old poll. (To top it off, the results were inconclusive. Now we’ll never know!)

There’s a new one.

I woke up to NPR’s Morning Edition. Evil, demonstrated.

It would be evil to contemplate aggressive war, which violates the most basic international law. It would be really evil to discuss it as if it were no big deal. No big deal at all. Not only that, but to ignore other options other than about 10 words at the beginning of the story referring to vague “diplomatic options.” And at the same time to ignore the fact that diplomacy can not work while nuclear states get respect and non-nuclear states get invaded.

It would be evil to discuss how to reduce the horrors faced by coal mine workers while offering cures that still essentially place all responsibility for safety on individual workers, rather than on mine managers. Rather than enforcing mine safety laws that already exist — the Sago mine had over 200 violations in the year before 12 workers died there — so the cure is to provide more oxygen tanks and electronic tags to keep track of exactly where miners are. Electronic tags, of course, will also help bosses fire people they think are lollygagging. And oxygen tanks? Yeah, that will do a hell of a lot of good against fires and collapses. Relegate structural solutions to silence. What’s good for the mine owners is good for America.

And most of all, it would be evil to wake up millions of Americans with a 7 a.m. newscast that spouts so much sinister nonsense. Time to go walk in front of a bus.

I have a new job in a fancy newsroom full of murmurs into phones and the perpetual pitter patter of keyboards and dozens of flat-screen TVs hanging from ceilings blazing with the overpowering light shows of CNN, MSNBC, Sky TV, and of course Fox News. As the day goes on, I sometimes zone out gazing at one or another monitor to see what the networks consider to be important.

Friday Fox News carried a lengthy report about the possibility that Victoria’s Secret might be marketing to teens. Unbelievable, isn’t it? That a maker of women’s lingerie would try to sell it to the women most insecure about their bodies and most susceptible to marketing messages? The ones at the beginning of their brand-loyalty lives? Shocking — almost as shocking as Crest toothpaste marketing to teens, or Fox News marketing to teens.

This story struck me as funny because the anti-porn do-gooder being interviewed, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, was, compared to the usual fake-tan pankcake makeup broadcast babes incredibly homely. I’m sure she was motivated by a real concern that young women receive too many messages promoting early sex. Which is a fair concern, even if her group deals with the issue in ridiculous ways. She was also on-screen for less than a quarter of her interview. The entire time she was talking, the network was playing tape from the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. It cracked me up that Fox was able to use supposedly moral scolds as a medium for their only cleavage of the day.

Meanwhile, American liberals are all upset because the mass media, which includes me, is not spending as much energy on the Bush Administration scandals as it did on Clinton’s blowjob. The thing they don’t understand is that Fox never cared about Clinton one way or the other. They don’t DO politics. TV news producers couldn’t care less who’s in the White House, so long as it’s exciting. Clinton’s routine good governance and feel-good speeches might have brought in some viewers. But every good producer knows that there’s nothing like boobies.

Judging by our comment history, some of our readership are sadly underdeveloped in the range of skills required to be evil. This might become a problem for them in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic future where they will need to be willing to backstab comrades for those precious six gallons of 93-octane unleaded, or administer some effective eye-gouges in the middle of a knife-fight. We thus present this (possibly) continuing series, hoping to contribute to your greater degeneracy. No need to thank us! That wouldn’t be evil.

So, a coalition of parents is suing Kellogg’s and Nickelodeon because they are apparently running commercial advertisements for “junk food” targeted at children. Both Nickelodeon and Kellogg’s deny this vehemently:

A Nickelodeon spokesman said the network has led young viewers to be more active and eat healthier–and has pushed sponsors for more balance in their offerings. And a Kellogg spokeswoman declared that the breakfast-staple maker is proud of its contributions to healthy diets, and its efforts to educate people about nutrition and exercise.

Let us learn from this example. First of all, you will note the use of official spokespersons. VERY evil. If you have an official spokesperson, you’re probably already well on your way to being a horrible bastard. Ideally, your official spokesperson should brazenly refuse to apologize for your crimes and conclude their sentences with an appropriate maniacal cackle, like the favored “Muahahaha!” or possibly a clangorous “Wahahahaha!”

If that proves impossible, though, it’s nearly AS evil to insist you’re being good when it’s clear to all and sundry that you are, in fact, some sort of cacodaemon. Observe the picture to the right, which combines the Kellogg’s product “Wild Bubbleberry Pop-Tarts” with the popular Nickelodeon character Sponge-Bob Squarepants. Now, let’s establish some facts. Although I haven’t consulted with a botanist, I am fairly certain that there is no such actual berry known as “bubbleberry”, although I have been able to determine that it is the name of a breed of cannabis plant. (I attribute this to coincidence. But those of you at home, note: marketing cannabis-filled Pop-Tarts to children would be AMAZINGLY evil.) For those of you who only consume Müëslïx, I will tell you that a Pop-Tart is a device containing a fruit-facsimile covered with a thin sheen of petroglaze, possibly studded with radioactive nubbins composed of Strontium, Iridium and the especially flavorful Rubidium. They were created as an emergency mechanism to prevent the stomachs of starving college students from collapsing while the damn cafeteria was closed on weekends.

It should be abundantly clear that encouraging kids to consume such a beast is NOT THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Neither Buddha, Jesus, Sgt. Slaughter, or any of the other Good Guys would approve of such a move. Yet not only did Kellogg’s and Nickelodeon team up to do this, they afterwards insisted that they care about the health of children and are proud of what they have done to contribute to it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is evil you can take to the bank and smoke.

Jon Schwarz reposts an amazing comment from TPM Cafe about what a colossally bad idea attacking Iran would be.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that we’re the nation of bad ideas at this point. Check out John McCain, the “reasonable” Republican and probably their strong candidate for the 2008 presidency, regarding the recent airstrike in Pakistan:

“It’s terrible when innocent people are killed. We regret that. But we have to do what we think is necessary to take out Al Qaeda, particularly the top operatives,” US Senator John McCain told CBS television’s “Face the Nation” program.

“We regret it. We understand the anger that people feel, but the United States’ priorities are to get rid of Al Qaeda, and this was an effort to do so,” the Republican lawmaker said.

This is merely a prelude to his asshat comment on Iran:

McCain also said Washington should be prepared to take military action if necessary against Iran, calling the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program the biggest international crisis in more than a decade.

“The military option is the last option but cannot be taken off of the table,” he said.

“This is the most grave situation that we have faced since the end of the Cold War, absent the whole war on terror,” the Republican lawmaker told CBS.

To quote Bart Simpson, “Nnyugh. ¡Ay Caramba!”