Where Anything is Possible

Next Thursday is the EU referendum and sorting all the arguments is a complete nightmare but lets start by looking at the bigger picture that is currently evolving from the EU camp first the German finance minister threatens Britain that we would not be allowed to enter the single market if we left and now the French minister Mr Macron says:

"Leaving the EU would mean the 'Guernseyfication' of the UK, which would then be a little country on the world scale. It would isolate itself and become a trading post and arbitration place at Europe's border."

It seems to me that the EU are doing their best to scare us and perhaps they think it is a little bit of reverse psychology in that they pushing us away to make us stay.  No offense to the voters out there but that is probably a little too clever for anyone to pick up on.  The last time Germany made threats we ended up with two world wars and I am sure nobody in their right minds wants to see that again.

What does it mean to be in the single market (good and bad):

• Free movement of goods - no customs at borders, goods are inspected at the traders premises
• No tax on goods - that's a good thing.
• Free movement of capital - this is brilliant news for terrorists far easy to conduct Money laundering.
• Free movement of services - which includes Internet purchases, how much do you buy from Internet because it is cheaper?
• Freedom of establishment - Set up a company anywhere in the EU (barring non-profit) great for avoiding paying taxes (sometimes)
• Digital Single Market - Internet, Telecoms (no more roaming charges), Delivery rates, copyright
• Free movement of persons - That means anyone in the EU can work, play or retire anywhere else in the EU plus there are no border controls.

The key issue is Freedom, remove these freedoms from the EU and you get a Police state.  Leaving the EU means leaving those freedoms behind will that change our internal freedoms hopefully not but by leaving we would be entering unknown territory effectively swapping the order of freedom with the chaos of freedom.  Chaos is where anything is possible good or bad.  Which would you prefer to do stay safe in the status quo or risk everyone's freedom, are we that selfish?.

Should we leave then other countries may decide to leave too which could create a snowballing effect to the breaking apart of the EU.  We would back to the 1940s (or worse the 1920s and the depression) and you only need one country to get too ambitious.  History repeats itself again and again, humanity makes it look easy.

Then you will have World War III, it is as simple as that (by 2030).

We all live on the planet for a short time and we are all abysmal at getting along with one another.  Mostly because we want more.

When I first started writing this article I was prepared to be swayed to the leavers side, I thought rocking the boat would be a good idea that chaos in a limited form would be okay but when you follow the simple logic through, the future prospect of a war in Europe is too great to ignore.  I have not directly experienced war (only the desensitized knowledge of what I see on the news) but my parents have.  They do not talk about it, why would want to talk about something that made you feel completely helpless.  In World War I we lost a complete generation of men and women, the second version was far worse.  A lot of the voters in this country have never known war and probably do not see it as a potential future threat but it is very real.

The problem is that most people do look that far ahead maybe five years maximum me included in fact I barely look a year ahead.  With a decision like this you have to look at least twenty to fifty years ahead which could be quite easily beyond many the current voters life spans but it is not beyond their children's.  When I give to charity it is always a children's one because they are our future, should we vote to leave then we could be taking their future from them.  How selfish are we?

There are arguments on both sides but this is the only one that really matters.

Chaos without Order is Anarchy and that only leads to a death.

A Crude Future

Recently I have been looking into what causes the changes in the cost Petrol/Gas, which is a product of oil.  Oil is a commodity, commodities are raw materials or primary agricultural products that can be bought and sold basically stuff that comes out of the ground or grown like:

• Corn
• Coffee beans
• Copper
• Gold

The price of oil sits upon a wobbly tripod (simplified):

Supply & Demand

High demand decreased supply will raise the price and the inverse will drop the price.

Speculators (futures market)

If enough buyers speculate that the price will rise then the suppliers will hold back until it rises in order to sell at a high price.  There have been a number of regulations put in the place since the 1990’s to stop this from spiraling out of control however Speculators can still affect the price.  And according to some 60% of the oil market is pure speculation and they could be right since any money market is effectively based upon a fantasy of potential profits.

Geopolitical Nature of the Economy

If a large country is in recession this means less manufacturing is going on, less jobs,  less people driving buying petrol/gas and less oil produced goods required by said country.  This affects their demand for oil products and we are back to supply and demand.

OPEC controls about 40% of the oil supply in the world which is based mostly in middle eastern countries which over years have been stricken with war.  In 1973 an oil embargo was placed against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the US for their involvement with the Yom Kippur War.  The price oil rose from $3 per barrel to $12 globally by end of the embargo in 1974

Natural disasters also affect the price normally making it rise.

The Industry

The oil industry is split into three categories: Upstream, midstream and downstream (midstream is considered to be part of the downstream)

Upstream

This covers all oil exploration, development and production of crude oil or natural gas.

Downstream and Midstream

This covers oil tankers, refiners, retailers and consumers

All three of these streams are contributing factors to the price.

United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS) – North Sea Oil
 
From the year 2000 UKCS has been in decline compared to ten years after 1966, between 2000 and 2008 there has been a 90% drop in new oil discoveries in the North Sea.  According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change who are responsible for UKCS over 50% over the North Sea oil reserve has been extracted in the last forty years, in theory there is up to 25 billion barrels are left.

As of 2013 the UK consumes more oil products than it produces which means it has become a net importer to balance its demand.  Offshore conditions make the UK a high-cost producer of oil however the UK exports oil-related goods and services that are worth more than $40 billion a year.

The cost of Brent Crude (which comes from the North Sea fields) is a major benchmark for the international oil market however its price has had a widening divergence from those of the other markets.  Lots of theories have been put forward for this and most of those appear in that wobbly tripod at the top of the page.

The Upshot

A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and the cost of oil makes up its own damn chaotic mind.

DIY Peace

What’s the best method of creating world peace, well before you go near any practical methods you really need understand the root causes of war.  If we think of war as a crime (which it is) then we could proceed by breaking the causes into three steps:

Motive, Opportunity and Means.

Motive

The grass is always greener in your neighbours garden, is this a good enough to go to war?  Your neighbour’s garden has oil underneath it, simplified you are greedy.

Your neighbour believes in different things to you, is this a good enough to go to war?  What does it matter what your neighbour believes, oh wait a minute because your neighbour does not believe as you do therefore your neighbour must be evil, your neighbour threatens the status quo.  Is religion an excuse or a reason?

Your neighbour's Great-great-great-great grandfather killed your Great-great-great-great grandfather, therefore your neighbour is evil.  This can be down to how children at brought up, the people on the other side of the wall are bad.

Tradition can be a killer of good values, it does not let people have their own experiences to become less likely to kill someone they have never met based upon something happened five generations ago.

Your neighbour is bad person, head of the government, takes from the poor and gives to the rich – that would be revolution/civil war.  A coup-d'etat would be a less violent method than full blown war.

Opportunity:
Well that happens a lot due the fact we tend live next door to every other country, islands fair better than most although that normally gives way to civil wars instead.  Of course through alliances with other countries you get multiple countries invading one or worst two super powers using a small country as a battleground to fight between their opposing ideologies like Vietnam and Korea.  Also a perfect battleground to test new weapons and guess what we are back to greed.  Are opposing ideologies an excuse?

Means

The top 6 arms exporters in the world are:

USA, Russia, China, France, Germany and the UK.

They are effectively all the super powers on the planet, if they wanted peace to occur it would be a simple method converting their weapons factories over to something useful like alternative energy supplies and recycling all weapons.  Money however TALKS!

To quote one of my favourite authors Issac Asimov: “Violence is the last refuge of incompetent” 

Which would make mankind staggeringly incompetent for most of its history, we have failed to learn from our mistakes.  This is irony on so many levels.

Enlightenment by Resistance

Would the absence of war mean peace or just a population under control?  For any civilization to develop you must have change and for change to occur you need resistance to the status quo.  If everyone agrees with everyone else then all that happens is stagnation, civilizations like that are easily destroyed by simple culture shock or the degeneration into the worship of the past, loss of science etc.

Violence should never be used as a form of resistance it gives in to our most basic of instincts which is why there have been very few periods in history where there is an absence of war.  Man has failed to evolve in the last ten thousand years if we had war would be non-existent by now.  Perhaps ten thousand years is too short of time to expect that amount of change to achieve enlightenment?

Unfortunately for us change is violent.

Feels Good to Give

Last week I saw a headline in the Daily Mail (I do not read it, just noticed it whilst standing in the queue at Waitrose) about how Britain sends 0.7% of  the national income to foreign aid their complaint was that it is being to used fund palaces of the super rich in those countries instead of going to the poor.

Apparently they got a petition going that clocked up 100K signatures in 24 hours, they said the nation roared.  Well the population of the UK is 64.1 million it is more like a squeak than a roar.

The Huffington Post refutes this story somewhat: In Defence of Foreign Aid

I will be the first to admit that I do not give enough to charities however it nice to know that some of my taxes go people less fortunate that myself in third world countries or places hit by war.  It is putting the Great back into Britain.  According to the Daily Mail:

Britain's aid budget is now second only to that of the US thanks to the Prime Minister's insistence on raising spending to 0.7 per cent of national income.

People complain about migrate workers coming into Britain do you think they would come if their own countries were not ravaged by war or famine and/or other natural disasters.  Whilst we do live on an island we all still live on the same planet.

It is about time Britain gave something back for all the staggering cock ups in history throughout the world all in the name of the Empire.  You can blame whoever was in government at the time but ultimately we the people voted them in or we stood by and said nothing.

Britain has been making a mess of other people's countries since year dot however to name one from the early 20th Century just after World War I, Mesopotamia was broken up by Britain into what know today as Iran and Iraq.  Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Britain imposed a Hāshimite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Christian Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Shi'ites and Kurds fought for independence, and the British employed Assyrian Levies to help quell these insurrections. Iraq also became an oligarchy government at this time.

I  was not even born yet but it feels like this was birth of bad things in Iran and Iraq, if only we had left them alone.  I will admit however that human nature being what it is I cannot blame all the bad things in the world upon my place of birth.

You think the Americans have had terrible foreign policies in their short history but Britain is a past master of making a pig's ear of foreign affairs.

Feels good to give something other than war.