I can understand someone being depressed or bitter about life. It happens all around us. But why would someone kill other people? Why would they spread their misery? Are we that callous and selfish as a society?

Have we become so obsessed with blaming other people for our problems that we can't imagine a better day?  Or imagine that we can take responsibility and change our own lives?

School shootings; killing of Amish children; suicide bombers; all are part of a culture of hate that's demonstrated every evening on the news and is increasingly present in every nation.

This is sad.

sharp

Well, it looks like sub-$2 gas is here. Unless someone can scare it higher - like Chavez or the impossible to spell or pronounce Iranian guy. Or Opec. Or nature. Or terrorists.

Slower than projected global growth, the glut on the market, the lack of hurricanes and warm weather (and my friends on the left will remind me - George Bush in some evil way) are conspiring to drive the price down.

Just as there was a perfect storm of forces driving it too far up, there could be a perfect storm of forces driving it too far down. But could that mean as far as $40?

 sharp

Looks like there's not much holding the price up right now. We'll see if it drops below last week's $59.50 low. Could be $1.99 gas this week. (I know I seem obsessed with this, but it's great news for our economy).

sharp

My view is that oil will continue to drop due to the glut on the market and the reduced expected growth for the next year. I look for $50 or less a barrel before years end and then rising again in the cold months of 2007.

However, one Bloomberg article notes that oil climbed 3.9% in the last week because Nigeria and Venezuela agreed to cut imports to bolster the price. An earlier article had said that OPEC memebers discussed actions they might take if the price got too low and that is what drove prices higher. OPEC has stated that they would act if it got below their target of $65 a barrel - but then some have said that oil is still fairly priced below that.

One recent article stated that oil always goes up in the spring and always comes down in the winter.  That columnist was noting the political folly of the Democrats in tying the Republicans to a vaporizing issue.  Harold Ford, a Tennessee Senate candidate, even has a slick commercial that was produced and only ran a few times that was all about high gas prices.  I hope his judgment is better than that if he becomes a Senator (it wouldn't be and he won't be).

Now, yet another analyst has noted, again found in a Bloomberg article, that the the decline in the price of oil is,

"'80 percent down to funds selling positions and 20 percent down to fundamentals,' said Edward Morse, chief energy economist at New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc."

Just for fun:  There are angry liberals who say that Bush dictates the price of oil (strangely this seems to be true when it goes up, but not when it goes down).  They must think he's a god.

I guess the real answer is that no one knows for sure where oil is going over the next few months, but there does seem to be consensus that it will rise in the long-term.  And that it's a good place to invest.  But not such a good place to be dependent.

sharp

Hamas has not been able to pay government workers since February.  They recently made partial payments from money given to them by Saudi Arabia and another country that I can't recall right now.  The problem is massive because about 2/3 of the Palestinian people are employed by the government and are now rioting daily.

The reason Hamas hasn't been able to pay the people is that America and most of the rest of the world has placed a financial embargo on them.  They aren't getting the financial aid that America and others had been providing to the Palestinian Authority when Fatah was in charge (Abbas and Yassir Arafat).  So the people are in dire straits.  In fact, there has also been a total clampdown on financial transfers from other Arab nations, at least until this past week.

The bad news for the Palestinian people is that even though they just received their first payment since winter, the banks took most of it for interest charges or to immediately pay off loans that looked likely to default - and the money didn't make it to the people.

So the bankers got theirs and the people continue to suffer.

But here's my question.  It seems extremely harsh for America and others to punish the people this way.  But the reality is that much of the aid given to them in the past has gone to fund terrorism and to line the pockets of the politically connected - while those same people blamed America for all their problems.  Secondly, the Hamas government wouldn't even go so far as to pretend to renounce terror (I have to hand it to them for being honest in a very dishonest world). 

So what would you do?  Would you send American and U.N. aid to them or would you follow the path that our government and other European governments have followed?

This is a difficult ethical dilemma, in my mind.

sharp