Milk Shake Oil

That spring, love was in the air and Edmilson decided to invite the girl of his dreams, Julia to have an ice cream in the small town square where they ate more powder than beans in their daily lives. That day, Julia put on her best dress, combed and straightened her hair. Joseph who was a smart guy wanted to be romantic because he had tried to know how to “win a woman” on YouTube. Although he preferred chocolate himself, he wanted to please himself and asked for a strawberry milk shake because, I do not know, he’ll see that she wanted to match his shirt, since he loved pink.

— Can not you ask for another one?
— Then you want to have it together?

She smiled and shook her head. He took his straw quickly out of the plastic, but she had difficulty with these packages that seem to be made for experts and if your hand is a bit greasy or sweaty forget it, ask for a saw because you will not be able to open its wrapper. But the attentive boy soon gently took his straw and pulled it out to her who smiled a little embarrassed and happy to be in front of a man (she saw him) so thoughtful.
With her head tilted slightly, Julia passed a film of the future of her life quickly between her eyes, a poetry, a castle … No, no! A beautiful lawn, blue sky with cotton-like clouds, daisies and bird trills that seem to frame the picture of the kiss that would give her future husband surrounded by his two little children …

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
— What? What was this? WHAT WAS THIS!

Julia sees before her eyes the rosy froth of what was once a glass of strawberry milk shake. There is no more milk shake. In his eagerness to touch her, Edmilson wanted to skip that step quickly and leave with the girl, directly to the square, on that reserved stool of attention, putting an end to the contents of that glass. But when dividing the SAME cup, anxiety plays against any and all training of romanticism online. The girl saw her dreams and essay of passion evaporate there in front of her, embodied in a man who now thought a petty, futile, selfish being. Edmilson would have noticed something wrong five minutes later when he tried to touch his hand that immediately retracted. Like a flower that would only bloom the following spring, but not for the same bee.
But do not worry, the girl will be fine and, to some extent, had an enriching experience, she became much more cautious. Unfortunately not everyone can say the same …
What made our girl disillusioned and act to prevent her suitor from holding her hand was no milk shake drug, but rather a value dear to her that could be understood as kindness, courtesy, chivalry, a personal sacrifice that some call love. However, disappointment with other people’s sucks is not always so moralistic. In other cases it is inherently utilitarian. One of the reasons why Saddam Hussein decided to go to war against the small neighbor Kuwait was his claim that he was being robbed, just as Edmilson did with Julia: sipping more. Unlike a cake or sweet rice in which we can lower the blade of a knife in a straight line by equanimously dividing the contents of a pot, the liquids need regular suction by the holders of the same deposit that, if they do not know, was there a lot long before national borders were established in the Middle East. While these are some tens of years, centuries at the most, mineral formations are hundreds of millions of years old in the case of hydrocarbons such as petroleum or billions in the case of metallic minerals.
Imagine that when oil began to be extracted on a large scale in the USA, a problem arose and was exactly that of our couple: how to divide a product that is liquid between properties? Following the tradition of Anglo-Saxon law to use preexisting cases to produce another set of jurisprudence and new laws, hunting legislation was adopted as a parameter. That is, in hunting season, if a deer is on your property, you have the right to slaughter him, but if he jumps the fence can forget, you can not go after him. This one passes to the property, although temporary of the neighbor, if it wants to hunt. In the case of oil, you could then fill your property with towers by extracting the black gold, although the growth of them was much faster than the mineral production itself. Thus, in the 1930s, Texas had an annual increase of 10% in production to 300% of infrastructure installation. Detail that these were installed, priority, next to the fences, because even if the bigger pocket was in the center of its property, all this proceeded to “steal” the petroleum of the neighbor. Except that all this proceeding produced a balance where no one, in fact, had his quota taken. Rational, is not it? Yes, when it comes to a country like the US and within its borders and in a country where, unlike other countries, the subsoil is private rather than state.
But what would we do if a deposit, which constituted the largest reserve in the world, was situated between two or more countries, whose belligerent history led to their separation, with a right to external influence, and, moreover, one of them was under severe crisis after great wear and tear with another neighboring country for an oil-rich coastal gulf? He thought of Iraq, Kuwait and Iran under the influence of the USA, Europe and the former USSR was right. In 1991, when Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein under this pretext, the country had just emerged from a war against Iran blown by enemy countries. Despite appeasing the mood of the Iranian Revolution by giving a sense of victory to the United States that wanted the weakened country to control the Gulf (with the world’s largest reserve), Iraq itself did not achieve its goals without advancing a millimeter in Chat-el- Arab, the shoreline at the mouth of the Gulf (called Arabic for Arabs, Persian for Iranians). Hundreds of thousands of dead men, loss of reserves, arms spending, destruction of the environment, etc. seemed to give Saddam a perfect justification for advancing on Kuwait that was stubbornly opposed to its strategy of retaining production supply (to raise prices) with OPEC. Kuwait, an important western ally, did the opposite by selling more cheaply in competition with the weakened cousins ​​in the Gulf.
This utilitarian reason did not make Saddam weep like Julia, but take advantage of it to retreat by attacking southern neighbors (Shiites opposed to his rule and supported by the enemy, Iran) when chased away by George H. W. Bush. Twelve years later he was to be hunted by his son, George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war criticized by the old American establishment, but not by the new neoconservative clique that thought it legitimate to shape the world before being provoked. In thesis, amorously speaking, they were right, were it not for one detail: one does not conquer the territory with only hard power. And to supply a power that was Saddam without leaving a vacuum has to manage several factions, as today competing (Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, neighboring allies like Iran, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.).
Well, the story is long and far from over, but when you have a milk shake with your girlfriend remember that for something like that a lot of people have not been so lucky. Anyway, #DaysGood WorldDay !!!

Anselmo Heidrich
2017–09–26