Again.
* * *
Call it 250 years' worth of oil. The Permian Basin contains a lot of oil. Enough oil that we could tell the rest of the world to go scratch approximately forever, until we no longer need to burn oil to move stuff around.
The heck of it is, the thinking here is correct. There will be a better way of doing that sooner or later. We're not going to be burning gasoline or diesel ad infinitum because sooner or later someone will figure out how to make a battery with an energy density on the order of gasoline, or they'll figure out how to build a compact electrical power source which obviates batteries entirely. And it is likely to happen within the next hundred years.
Heck--all it would really take is a sea change in how the public perceives nuclear power. Move away from using fossil fuels to generate power and make sure there's a robust fuel cycle. How much electricity would people use if it cost half what it does now? A quarter? A tenth?
* * *
Black athlete Charles Barkley is a "white supremecist" because he says black people should stop killing each other and start attending school.
But apparently not killing others of your race, and learning to do useful things, that's acting white, and only a white supremecist would ever suggest that black people learn things and not kill each other. The converse of that must mean that violence and willful ignorance are integral parts of black culture. (If that's reducto ad absurdum I sure can't see how.)
Think about what that says. Think about how racist that actually is. "If you're black, you have a responsibility to be mindlessly violent, and doing anything else--advocating anything else--makes you a race traitor!"
If that's what you think--if you think obeying the rules and making something of yourself is "assimilating into white culture"--then you'd be better off going to Africa and staying there, because even if you're working as a writer for a radical black culture web site you are still "acting white", aren't you? After all one would presume you got some kind of education; even if it was merely in "black studies" you still attended college, right? Isn't that "acting white", to go get a college degree?
I make the assumption about the writer of the idiotic screed because that's a level of fatuity which can only come from a self-styled intellectual. In fact, the nonsense from that web site actually proves how right Barkley is.
Well, there's no shortage of black culture in Zimbabwe! (What "black culture" is according to Michael Harriot of the Root, as noted at the prior link.) The country's leader, Robert Mugabe, says that black people won't be punished for murdering white people when white-owned farms were seized and given to blacks in 2000. In fact, he doesn't even think they should have been arrested.
Eliminating the white farmers utterly destroyed Zimbabwe's ability to feed itself, but that's okay, because apparently a country that can provide enough food for its people is also "acting white" and we wouldn't want to force white culture on black people, would we?
* * *
Well, better get moving, I guess. Problem is, I still ache mightily from yesterday's festivities. Woke up at 3 AM and could not get back to sleep, with the result that instead of getting eight hours of sleep I got one chunk of three hours and another chunk of about 3.5 hours, separated by an 1.5 hour intermission of insomniac tossing and turning. Either the fatigue or the muscle pain could be easily surmounted, but not both together.
Besides that, it's a pleasant Saturday. The neighbor across the street is doing something in his garage and has his radio on loud enough that I can hear it, but it's not super-loud--the crickets are louder--and it's country music and I can tolerate that. (Unlike pop, R&B, or rap, which make me wish destruction on mankind.) And on a pleasant Saturday like this one, all I want to do is lay in bed.
Work on the novel has stalled again as other things take precedence.
*sigh*