7 gallons of oil in every tire. Plastic (oil) dashboard, electrical insulation, etc. Rare earth minerals and well, heck, all the metal in the vehicle mined by gas powered machines, transported by gas powered machines to smelters, and then by gas powered machines to the manufacturing plant.

Tell me again about those "cheap solar/electric vehicles" again?

And what portable energy do we use to run all that equipment to mine the uranium? Oh yeah, oil.

And what portable energy do we use to run all that equipment to mine the coal? Oh yeah, oil.

Yup, solar, wind, wave power, etc... all rely on oil, whether it be to run the power lines, mining/smelting the raw materials (copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, rare earths, etc), or whatnot, we could not build *any* of them without oil as it stands today.

Wait, pay attention to the... oh look, American Gladiator is on! Ooh, Kim and Kanye are on the news! ... you were saying? Never mind. :-P

You expect any of the average "sheeple" to actually do any research for themselves? LMFAO!! :D

I did this one a few years back when someone was commenting to me how "Illinois has 250 years of coal" (because, of course, the MSM and the state website said so:

The links are long since broken, but honestly, it's basic division - a skill most people should have gotten in elementary school, plus looking up some consumption numbers.

Nobody is going to bother doing that though, not when "but they said so on the news!". And, quite honestly, they deserve whatever they get in return for not bothering to pay actual attention and believing what's handed to them.

That's only from a quick google, BTW, not going beyond the first page of results for any of them. I'm sure a bit of searching could find far more, including some more 'mainstream' sources - but since I know that most people (like you) expect to have things handed to them on a platter rather than do their own research and make their own decisions, it probably won't really make a difference. Heck, a lot of people still believe Saddam had WMDs, even though we found nothing, it has mostly been proven to have all been lies, as the UN inspectors said so at the time.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html

Time magazine "mainstream" enough for you?

http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1095057.html

Or that, less mainstream though. Note both are from 2000 (before we attacked Iraq/Saddam).

http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/markets/item/4630-gadhafis-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar

Several links in there, some stale but a few at least worked.

http://www.oil-price.net/en/articles/iranian-oil-bourse-opening.php
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Iran-Opens-Oil-Bourse-Harbinger-of-Trouble-for-New-York-and-London.html
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2314.cfm

I'm sure there's a lot more on the Iran oil bourse, it's in wikipedia as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_oil_bourse

Yeah, I remember how thoroughly non-useful a 386/33 was back in the day... I mean, all it could do was word processing, spreadsheets, CAD, SPICE simulations, as well play games like Doom, etc... totally non-useful. And stuff these days like Arudino and PIC chips, who the heck could possibly use low-end chips like for anything "useful"?!? I mean, if you're refrigerator or thermostat, or your car even, doesn't have a 4Ghz 8-core CPU in it - it's just totally useless!!

(I might add here the space shuttle ran with "useless" low end (by today's standards) hardware for decades, and most of the manufacturing robotics/automation that exists in the *world* right now runs on "low end" processors - cheap, effective, and powerful enough for what they need to do).

Why is it that I read that and think if you just substitute "Obama" for Putin and "US" for "Russia" (or Russian) and it sounds pretty much right as well?

And unemployment is under 6.5%, if you don't count the millions of people that dropped off unemployment and still haven't found jobs.

Oh yeah, and inflation - according to the CPLie, I mean CPI - is like 1.5%. You can buy a whiz bang TV, better than last years model, for cheap... of course, you can't eat a TV. Meanwhile the things you use daily, like food and energy, are going up at 8+%/yr, but lets not count those as part of "inflation". Gee, we can't figure out why people seem to be cutting back and spending less - just because the food and energy they need to survive has doubled in the past 10 years while their incomes have stayed stagnant shouldn't stop them from buying 50" 3D TVs and expensive new cars, should it?

Go back to sleep America, turn on the TV, that's it, 200 channels of fake news and American Gladiator to keep you occupied, don't read anything, don't actually learn how to do math for yourself, the news says that 2+2=22, the economy is doing great, go back to sleep America... you are free to do as we tell you, you are free to do as we tell you.

Everything since has just been a "police action", or in the case of Libya we get even more obscure, it was a "time limited scope limited kinetic action".

Really is a shame... like I hear everyone talking about evil "communist" countries... without any clue that there really has never *been* a truly "communist" country. 99.9% of the people I hear tossing around "communism", "Marxism", and the like have never actually read Marx or done any reading on the subject, they're just blindly parroting what they hear in the media. Like calling Obama a "socialist" and "left liberal", when he's really "right of center" (the Republicans being "far right" and there really being no, or very few, actual "left" candidates for anything), and is about as "socialist" as McDonalds and Lockheed Martin.

... well, and they probably would have been even better off with Mossadegh, but he wanted to keep more oil profits for the people of his own country, to improve their lives, and "we" couldn't allow that.

Anyone who actually believed that Saddam had nukes wasn't actually paying any attention to anything but the propaganda on the news. There was lots of conflicting reports out there, the UN inspectors flat out said there was no chance he was hiding a nuclear program, it was all over the news if you actually paid attention - I for one knew they were lying to drum up support for a war, it was obvious as hell. The main problem there is that the bulk of the population has the attention span of a gnat and is more interested in Snookie and Kimye and who got voted off the island than anything to actually do with what their own government is doing and being an actual *participant* in this thing we call democracy (really a republic).

I had gone on a couple dates with a woman that then made the comment to me of "I don't really care, I trust them to do the right thing"... I wasn't dating her shortly after that (not the sole reason, but one of several). Most people are more concerned with how much it costs to fill their car up to get to Walmart and buy Doritos and cheap imported Chinese crap than they are with what our government is doing. They weren't "voting" for anything about the Iraq war, unless you count being willfully ignorant of any real facts because they rely on a few 'news' blurbs without any real investigation as "informed". They were simply parroting what they were told to parrot by our "leaders".

No, that's not it at all. Look, *nobody* is saying that the nuclear launch codes shouldn't be top secret information and not given out to the public, and *nobody* is saying that our nuclear bomb research (in depth) shouldn't be secret... but it's not a secret that there *are* launch codes and bomb secrets. Nobody is saying that we shouldn't have secret research for new military hardware, Lockheed Skunkworks type stuff, etc - we know it exists and much of it is "black budget" stuff, but there's a reason it's secret.

Nobody (I don't think) is saying the government shouldn't be able to *get a warrant* (with reasonable suspicions) to wiretap someone, track their cell location, and any number of other things. Even if the warrant is issued by a secret court on a person-by-person basis, there may well be reasons the warrant shouldn't be "public record". That being said, *everyone* should be against warrantless tracking/wiretapping of citizens of your country, not of select people but of *everyone* in bulk. If they can't come up with a reason for someone, much less *everyone*, to be a "suspect" and get a properly issued warrant from a judge for that person (or people) *by name*, then they shouldn't be doing it because it is illegal. They don't want the documents of even just what they are doing (in general, without any specific names/people) released - nobody is asking them where the 'taps' are for the internet cables, what the exact technology is they are using, etc... but when they can go in front of Congress and flat out *lie* about gathering information on everyone, there's an obvious problem.

I'll wait for MansonFS, it has a longer history and doesn't pretend to be innocent.