For listeners of FSN this weekend, Tim Wood made several statements about the seemingly rapid advance in the price of oil. viz. "I don't see anything that can justify the rate of the advance in oil." I have a great deal of respect for Tim Wood, but one can see here, the limits of pure technical analysis. I agree with him, that looking at the chart oil seems to have advanced very rapidly and ready for a significant pullback, HOWEVER, and this is a big however, the price of oil has been artificially suppressed for a long, long time. A lot of people all over the world have been working their butts off in order to support our lifestyle of cheap energy, food and "stuff." This is basically because they have been worshipping us for the past 60 years because we beat the crap out of everybody in the world in WWII. Those "warriors" are now mostly dead and we are into the third generation after the battles of WWII. Alive now are their grandchildren, basically a fat, lazy, feeling-entitled bunch. They've always had it good, and are of the belief that that is to always be their lot in life. Alas. It will not always be so. Fat Americans are going to be getting a lot skinnier in the next twenty years. In any event...the price of oil has gone up rapidly, but I like to compare it to chronic smoker who just has been diagnosed with lung cancer and is going down hill fast. Patients always say the same things to me. They ask, "How did it happen so fast?" "He was just fine last week." I try to explain it to them that he was not just fine last week, that the tendency towards disease had been building for year, but people have a hard time understanding this. They also have a hard time understanding that once a disease process begins it can advance rapidly. It doesn't always proceed slowly and orderly and give everyone all the time they need to prepare for the worst. Actually, I think they can understand on some level, but they don't want to believe the reality that is happening to them or their loved ones. That there are consequences for our actions is often a painful reality, especially for those whose actions have often been of the types they are not proud of. I liken what is happening to oil as indicative of the disease of waste that we in America have been a part of for a long time. James Howard Kunstler is right, in the Long Emergency (Hear Jim Puplava interview him in the Archive of FSN) we have been a wasteful people, building a society on the dream of cheap oil forever. The suburbs, the 3000 mile Caesar salad, jet setting all over the world without good purpose, letting our kids rot in day care while we drive 100 miles to work to do unproductive things to build the imaginary "Service Economy." This will all soon stop, and it may not stop slowly but might just come to a sudden halt, and very few of the weaklings we and our friends have raised or have been raising will do very well. So, in response to Tim Wood, I see everything that justifies the rapid advance in the price of oil. The rise is rapid, but so is the death of the man with a heart attack. But it started for him in a McDonald's restaurant years before. Bull