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Living on an oil market credit card’ — US strategic petroleum reserve falleth to its lowest level since October 1982. {Oilprice Intelligence 28 September}
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/u-strategic-petroleum-falls-lowest-183000158.html
October 1982. I was enrolled in nursery school; ‘Jack & Diane’ reigned atop the American charts, whilst Culture Club sat atop the UK charts; Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher presided as the leaders of the free world, and the Soviet Union remained a menace, with glasnost and the end of the Cold War not yet on the horizon. The World Wide Web did not exist; commercially available handheld mobile phones lay yet in the future; and only roughly a third of American households had access to cable television, to say nothing whatsoever of YouTube, TikTok, and today’s sundry other contrivances.
At that time, the United States lay mired in a fairly deep recession; the ‘malaise’ associated with President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 crisis-of-confidence speech remained palpable, though the cloud would begin to lift over the ensuing two years. Though I was but a small lad, the pessimism characterising late-1970s and early-1980s America proved, by any reasonable measure, decidedly mild when set against the distressing temper of Trumpistan in 2026.
Perchance one day the world shall have achieved complete independence from fossil fuels — an argument for another day — but for now, oil remains a form of geopolitical currency and, for producing states, a potent source of wealth and international leverage. And whilst painfully foolish Americans continue to bray incessantly concerning the supposed wonders of this Donald Trump’s leadership, the international community at large beholds, instead, a cutthroat, oligarchical régime engaged in stripping its own nation of wealth and resources; an orange-hued dictator and underlings rendering their country both sicker and poorer in equal measure; and altogether too many Americans comporting themselves as belligerent idiots, without respite or relief.
I may have been but four years of age, and my personal memories of those halcyon days remain, at best, exceedingly hazy; yet I know, without the slightest doubt, that this nation was assuredly neither so foolish nor so crass in October 1982 as it is forty-four years hence. Nor doth it presently possess uncontested global primacy, notwithstanding protestations to the contrary emanating from the very cabal undermining it, together with their useful dupes residing amongst us. Those who maintain otherwise are lying — to others and to themselves, whilst placing their faith in the flatteries proffered by populist demagogues.
Populism is, ever hath been, and ever shall be a cancer upon any nation or people that falleth beneath its sway.
🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈
