Another Nightmare: China's Thirst For Energy -- Oilprice -- October 24, 2019

Nothing new here, but a fun article to read. See link below.

There have been a lot of "peak demand" articles recently. Apparently the "peak oil" meme failed, and so the next meme came along, "peak demand."

Sure.

Link here. Data points, quotes, and observations from the linked article:

• China's population four times that of America's 330 million
• China is already at a severe energy disadvantage
• the gap will widen
• China already scrambling to meet energy / water needs to sustain current population
• energy / water demand to "skyrocket"
• IEA: China's natural gas consumption to grow at nearly Beijing's previous projections
• the forecast came after President XI placed a 25% tariff on LNG from the US, starting June 1, 2019; "cut off one's nose to spite's one's face"
• that decision no doubt made a bad situation worse (sort of like the pipeline ban in NYC)
• China already the world's fastest-growing importer of natural gas
• second biggest importer of LNG, following Japan
• China's efforts to boost domestic production may be too little, too late

"Peak demand"? Probably not.

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The Book Page

This week (actually it's a bedside bookshelf book): Provocations: Collected Essays, Camille Paglia, c. 2018.

I've had this book for a year. I will generally read an essay or two every few weeks. I have to be "in the mood" to read her essays, and it's a not book one would read from beginning to end.

Word for the day: melismatic.

From essay #49, "On Canons," page 383:

The centrality of canons can be seen in popular music. Seventeenth-century British ballads, preserved in America's Appalachian Mountains, were reinterpreted during the 1930s and '40s bythe leftist folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Guthrie's devoted disciple, Bob Dylan, then shaped the imagination of an entire generation and made an immense impact on other singers and bands worldwide.

The canon in black music equally obvious: West African motifs (with melismatic Muslim tonalities) survived under slavery in rural African-American blues and were transmitted through singers Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf to young musicians in the postwar British blues revival, such as the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. In Brazil prolific canonical figures of genius status, such as Antonio Carlos Jobim and Dorival Caymmi, can be easily identified.

From elsewhere, an essay on Amy Winehouse:

You know what melisma is by now, surely. It's when a singer takes a word or phrase and, instead of stapling it to one note, uses the occasion to worry the word through the entire musical scale, in a display of vocal acrobatics designed to wow judges and people gathered at a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah.

It's showy. It's dazzling. It takes a while to learn.

Even Shakespeare had a phrase for it: "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Amy Winehouse had no use for such tricks. When she sang, she told you what she was actually feeling. In lyrics that were smart, snarky, darkly funny and often had a wicked backspin on them. But in her own colloquial, un-tricky, no-melismas-allowed-here voice.

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Politics

A brand new poll has been posted over at RealClearPolitics. This is a biggie. A lot of folks consider Quinnipiac one of the more reliable pollsters. If so, look at this:

• Biden: 21% (wow -- down from 31% where he has been trending for quite some time)
• Pocahontas: surges to 28%; and clearly out-pacing Biden; should give Biden huge concern
• Sanders: pretty much unchanged at 15%
• others: pretty much in line with where they've been for quite some time -- going nowhere
• Klobuchar momentum: if one considers a jump from 2% to 3% momentum, Klobuchar has it
• Buttigieg at 10% nationally, but in South Carolina he will be lucky to poll 3%
• but that spread between Pocahontas and Biden in the Quinnipiac poll, I think, will turn out to be an inflection point