Yikes! Shock at the Bowser

Filling the tank with petrol these days is an expensive "pleasure"!

I posted an item on this blog on 24 April last about how the great Sun King, Rupert Murdoch, welcomed the Iraq War as something which would lead to the cost of oil coming down to US$20 a barrel.

Today's Financial Review publishes a figure I have never seen anywhere before, namely - the number of barrels of oil exported by Iraq has dropped by some 500,000 per day from what it was before the start of the Iraq War. This fact has been material in driving up the price of oil.

Oh yes! Oil in New York is presently being quoted around US$75 a barrel. Thanks George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.......

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The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend. Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

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What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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