An embarrassment* of referrerals for the day

david carr leopold • quotes s1m0ne • krugman leopold • jerry nachman editor post • Bewitched porn • "Brett Keeton" • tom barbash email • Joseph Epstein Think You Have a Book • "advertisement poster " & "perception" • muppet beaker picture • Virginia Vitzthum • meaning of driver 8 • masturbation clips • Scooby Doo and gang smoking cigarette

These are just too many to try to investigate at this late hour of the night!

* If that's not what a group of referrerals is called, just consider the above entries and perhaps you'll agree with me that it may be the right denomination.

Lying through the mail: Here's an "activist" e-mail which happened to land on my in-box.

Well, that's quite a mouthful, saying you are financing terrorists with every gallon of gas you buy from those companies. But a little investigation proves the empty claims behind this message. And I didn't even have to check with the DoE; all it took was a search at the Urban Legends Reference Pages to find they had already done all the work.

Although the message quoted above doesn't address where (outside of the Middle East) we import oil from, many people come away from reading it with the mistaken impression that most of the USA's crude oil is imported from the Middle East. It isn't. According to the most recent figures regarding crude oil imports, only 31% of the USA's imports came from Arab OPEC countries (Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) in January 2002. The top six countries (by percentage of total USA imports) supplying crude oil to the USA in January 2002 were:

Saudi Arabia:	16.9%
Mexico:	15.1%
Canada:	15.0%
Venezuela:	14.4%
Iraq:	11.4%
Nigeria:	5.9.%

...only 56% of the oil exported from the Persian Gulf in 2001 came from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and that figure is probably even lower now that Iraq has cut its oil exports in protest of Israel's recent actions on the West Bank.

..."doing the math" and multiplying [the number of imported barrels for February 2002] by $30/barrel and projecting them over the course of a year, supporting only the companies listed [as not importing Middle Eastern oil] would still be putting $3.76 billion dollars per year in the coffers of Middle Eastern countries.