Monk

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Would anyone care to make a bet on when life on earth is extinguished? You can.

I am glad to see that the Times is allowing John Tierney to maintain some visibility at the paper. A creative and quirky thinker. In this piece he writes about doomsday predictions and on betting on them. Gotta love the internet!

( Tierney article )

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Rising oil prices are making themselves felt again. Although we are not coming close to the long gas lines of the 1970s, the political turmoil in the Mideast makes for an ominous picture. We will tag a couple of pieces to capture some of the sense of this time.

Mr. John Tierney of The New York Times gives us an optimistic perspective, focusing on the long term, arguing that human ingenuity has always afforded society only more plentiful and cheaper natural resources - Cornucopian economics. One is more impressed with the fact that Tierney is moved to offer such a counterveiling argument.

However, even if the Cornucopian model were true, and should continue to be true, Mr. Fareed Zakaria offers a more sober analysis for the near term. Oil money takes away incentives for non-democratic regimes to reform and become more liberal democratic, and more directly, more oil money means more money into terrorist coffers.

And we also have that old joke that in the long term we are all dead.

( Oil columns )

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