Robot Monkeys

God lowered gas prices.

“We don’t have anybody else to turn to but God,” Mr Twyman told the BBC. “We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man.”
[...]
“We believe not just in prayer - because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we’ve encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it’s a combination of faith with these other factors.”

So Mr. Twyman, if you just car pooled and generally dropped oil consumption without praying, oil prices would stay high?

Good thing it was your incantations over a gas pump rather than my magic rock I’ve been petting every night.

from CNN

The kingdom will work to ensure there will be no “unwarranted and unnatural oil price hikes that could affect international economies, especially those of developing countries,” said [Information and Culture Minister Iyad] Madani.

There’s just something bizarre about a cartel protecting us from high prices. That’s not what cartels do. Cartels maintain a price as high as possible that demand doesn’t appreciably suffer.

This means that the price of oil has become high enough that its beginning to effect the world economy, leading to inflation and decreased demand. This talk about cutbacks is what’s really got OPEC moving. Not the price itself. So they’re going to increase supply just enough to bring the price back down back down to it’s “natural” (read, artificially maintained) price.

“Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” – Ken Lay

Well no, not really, but it might as well have been.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating Enron’s role in setting up a regime to manipulate crude oil prices. A regime that still lives on some seven years after Enron’s collapse.

Enron and the complete collapse of the regulatory mechanisms in the 90s really apparently did a number. Not only did Enron cause the California Power Crisis, and through extension oust Gray Davis for the Governator™, but apparently they’re responsible for setting up a shadow market to manipulate the price of oil.

So I’ve seeing the propaganda ads from the American Petroleum Institute talking about how we should pump America dry. The big selling point? We have enough oil to last us 60 years. We can run out in my lifetime. Jesus. That’s a winning solution, all the way.

Not to be out done, the coal industry just ran ad saying how if we don’t strip mine America, “We’ll have to say goodbye to the American life we all love.” Wow. Fear. Nice.