I conflated the pledge of allegiance with the Constitution
And of which it should be noted: The phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954. The original form from 1892 lacked the phrase — and was written by a Baptist Minister. (Admittedly, he later abandoned his parish when pressured of his sermons' political content, and stopped attending church in his retirement due to a perception of racial bigotry there.)
and my oath to this country which ended "so help me God", someone that I don't know whether he/she exists or not
Such additions are a personal preference; the President has traditionally made this addition as well, but the oath specified in Article 2, Section 1 does not so end. Accomodation (usually omitting it) is usually made for atheists giving such an oath who have objections to the phrase, under the religious test rule from Article 6. "Legally", I believe it's considered the addition of a public but personal prayer after taking such an oath. Which is not a bad tradition, all in all.
Almost. The decision was 9-0... which is not quite the same thing. Two separate concurrences with the main opinion were filed; everyone agreed that Grokster was run by a bunch of Jackasses who deserved to get exactly what they have coming, but the question of what should happen to the next fellow trying to rely with better faith on Sony was a little more divided.
It would take some serious work to find the last completely unanimous decision (without separate concurrence) that came from the SCOTUS. And there were cases in the 1800's where each justice filed a separate opinion....
All I can say is that John Adams is certainly no James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, as any study of his Presidency would reveal.
A point I will conceed. Alas, George Bush isn't even close to being a John Adams, as a study of their mutual efforts pre-presidency will reveal. Adams at least had a height to fall from, to make his failures more tragic than farce.
Gee, it seems that Jefferson and Madison were religion neutral as well.
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
--James Madison
..."the successful experiment made under the prevalence of that delusion on the clause of the constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro' the U.S.; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to To Dr. Benjamin Rush, Monticello, Sep. 23, 1800. (Emphasis added, because the quote fucking rocks. )
The "withered little apple-John" was a proponent of keeping church and state well separate, and Mister Jefferson was anything but neutral to established religion, albeit perhaps on amicable terms with his creator. If the people wish to place menorah, crosses, and mistletoe-strewn oak trees amidst the public square, that is all well and good... but for the nation, state, city, or school board to do so is another. (Yes, I've read the Koran. I prefer The Principia Discordia before bedtime, but own copies of both on my shelves.)
For some reason, Fundamentalist Evangelicals seldom cite Jefferson, and never do so referring to the full source. =)
As for the other issues which you don't address, again the 10th Amendment covers it very nicely. If it ain't in the Constitution, a document I swore a long time ago to preserve, protect and defend and still hold to that oath despite my country breaking faith from me, it is left to the states or the people.
Article V: Amendments "shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution". Which means you're still stuck (as I noted) with Amendment 14, not to mention assorted loons empowered by Article III until and unless they quit or keel over dead.
Yes, when the most conservative strict constutionalist member of the SCOTUS dies you get concerned about the loss of your rights.
Quibble: Scalia isn't dead yet. Both he and Thomas are usually accounted more conservative and stricter constructionalists than Rhenquist. The scary part is, Rhenquist was getting to be considered a moderate.
(Clue: Rhenquist was a Nixon appointee.)
(Clue: Rhenquist didn't shift to the left.)
If GWB is smart, he cut a deal with the senate to appoint a more "moderate" individual in exchange for no fighting on the nominations, not likely but possible.
I believe it was the SCOTUS Nomination Blog that was speculating that Bush might nominate O'Connor to become Chief, back when everyone thought Renquist would be the first to announce stepping down. (I almost said "would be the first to leave"... but he was. O'Connor's resignation is not final until her replacement is appointed.) There was speculation immediately afterward that she might be brought back for the Chief's spot later on. Considering she is leaving for family reasons, I deem this unlikely, barring the (not anticipated) death of her husband, or a (less anticipated) cure for his Alzheimers.
I'm deeply terrified the new chief will be Gonzales, barring direct divine intervention.
I'm not concerned about the political leanings so much as I am about getting someone who doesn't think "The Internet" is a feature of premium adult diapers.
They may be assholes. They may be fossils. They may be lawyers even. But by God, there is not a one of them who is STUPID. (Which last detail caught both sides by an unseemly amount of suprise during Reno v. ACLU; try feeding Dick & Jane to someone who expects Dickens & Bronte and see how they react.) And they are far from oblivious to the modern world around them.
Being liberal-to-libertarian, I'm hoping that Bush nominates some withered old ancient... so another Renquist-type change is more likely all the sooner. However, given Roberts is only 50, it seems unlikely Bush will be that stupid.
Unfortunately, she's too activist a judge to be able to survive confirmation. Mind you, given that our government has gone from Three Ring Circus to Media Circus, I'll consider this yet one more sign that the nation is doomed. On the other hand, I've heard stupider proposals.
I'm not a Christian, never have been, but it's part and parcel of the Declaration of Independence (Creator anyone?) and the Constitution (God anyone?)
Here we go again with this old debate....
Yes, the founders of the United States believed in God -- but this makes them Deists, not necessarily Christians. The Declaration of Independence does indeed speak of "Nature's God", and refer to mankind being "endowed by their Creator" -- but makes no mention of Christianity.
Furthermore, NOWHERE in the Constitution do the words "God" or "Christ" appear — a point oft considered conspicuous by omission in favor of "We The People". Rather, specific references are made to separate church and state, requiring within the constituion proper "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States", and in the Bill of Rights opening with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
Add in the evidence of the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli as ratified by Congress and as published with little stir in the Press (albeit not as drafted at the treaty table!) which declared "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." , leads one to believe the Founders were doing their utmost to drag the United States away from the sectarian bloodshed that had divided Europe -- and particularly England -- for centuries.
Jefferson is the source of the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" that the religious right so detest; a man who removed all references to the miracles from his personal transcription of the Gospels; and who felt that his authorship of the Stature of Virginia for Religious Freedom one of the accomplishments most worthy for noting in his epitaph. Living in Charlottesville and having recently visited Monticello, I feel obliged to assure you that the persistent ground vibrations you can feel standing in front of his tombstone is not the rumble of a passing truck, but Mister Jefferson spinning in his grave from Bush's Presidency. =)
As for your assertion on abortion, while your position is better founded, I suggest you read the actual Roe v. Wade ruling all the way through; your assertion about the rights of the states in the 10th Amendment falls aside explicitly to the later "Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment"... although the court might reasonably revisit such a question, given the strained reasoning used. This makes the abortion war yet another twisted legacy of the debate over our former "peculiar institution."
As to your prime assertion on the legal import of the intent of the founding fathers, I suggest you read Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace"... plus a good more of the biographies of those colorful, contestous, and amazingly human founders of ours. Leaving aside Lessig's points on unaddressed assumptions, suggesting they ever had a single unified intent is a slander to their memories and to what they achieved in their struggle to unify in common cause.
It applies. Until recently, I was a developer at Microsoft, and we had anti-trust training as well.
It's obviously not being given to those at higher levels... or some people who think that because they set company policy, they can then ignore company policy.
Incorrect. Merely calling for a boycott is not necessarily enough, and most companies can poll well enough to realize if their conduct is likely to trigger people deciding on a widespread boycott, and moderate their practices enough to defuse such situations. On rare occasions where it does get bad enough for a boycott, the company quickly takes steps to address the cause.
It's similar to tactics which have been weakening organized labor for decades. Of course, there's the risk of building up enough widespread difuse resentment to trigger major social upheaval, which as a rule is bad for business. But with the dumbing down of America, those with the ability to organize such change generally find it easier these days to take steps to benefit themselves personally.
I'm not sure about some of the other Angband varients, but IIRC in T.O.M.E the less sanity you have, the more likely you are to hallucinate.
No help; I believe this is idiosyncratic to TOME, which forked off circa 2001-2002. The patent application reportedly was filed in 2000... meaning this is not prior art. Come to think of it, I don't know when it was added to Nethack.
Sounds like one of those "Build a nuclear bomb" anarchy bullshit articles.
I've criticized the technical merits of some of those... especially when Malkin started blogging about one appearing on some Arab nutjob site, and various other idiots started being even stupider. I had three years majoring in nuclear engineering, prior to dropping out from loss of interest — all of the really interesting problems left in the field are political, and was getting depressed by constantly looking at that aspect.
I could do a better job describing how to build a nuke; my playing around with conventional explosives is pretty limited.
I'm not sure how you'd actually rig the primer for such a Kaboom bay; when my freinds played with thermite a few times, we mostly used a thin magnesium strip sticking out of a wad of strike-anywhere matches, with another match at the end pointing the other way for a fuse. And the folks talking about water dissociation may be right; we mostly worked on an ex-building's concrete slab foundation... which we ruined even more. A concrete slab is often not conveniently close in many apartment buildings — just inconveniently accessible. =)
Custom built 5.25" bay metal box, front side key locked switch controlling 12v powered spark igniter for magnesium primer charge; remainder of the box filled with thermite. Install in the computer's top bay. You can generally get all the way through at least eight drives that way, but if you have vertical mount drives, you'll want a second kaboom bay in the lowest 5.25 bay. Have a good UPS, and have a metal-bottomed water tank below the computer (camoflage as an overclock device), because that much thermite does NOT stop quickly.
They can pry my PGP key from my computer's cold dead... um, slag. =)
Make sure by ordering the right adapter for doing forensic's work that Your Young Apprentice (or PFY) can't screw this up. A read-only adapter means the drive can't be mounted rewritably. No, it's not cheap. But what's $500 to the assurance that your evidence chain is prevented from fuckup at the hardware level?
And no, I don't work for these people. I just think they make some nifty geek toys.
No, that's not why I have SCSI drives on my home server. Honest; it's for the RAID performance....
OK, unleashing the Old Ones to devour your competitors is a little unscrupulous, but at least it's not unleashing lawyers.
(And yeah, there's some prior art in Angband and other roguelikes, but I think it's more binary (off/on) than progressive in effect. There might be some substance to the patent.)
The town of "Fucking" (that really is the name) in Austria had a problem with people stealing the signs. They recently moved to a new system, where the signs are really hard to steal. But as the mayor said -- "it would take all night to steal".
Not with proper preparation. About 300 grams of thermite, one magnesium-based Hurricane Match, a liter of water, a getaway car; 90 seconds and it's mine. (KIDS! Don't try this at home!)
Of course, there are often more amusing things to do with that combination of ingredients.
Diamonds currently retain value as expensive the same way Oil does.
A gross distortion — about oil. You are basically right about diamonds. While he may overhype matters somewhat, Epstein's classic book documents how the diamond cartel has been ruthless in its limit of supply to a value-sustaining level of marketing-created demand. If supply were to float free, diamonds would drop sharply in price. Furthermore, their intrinsic value within the economy isn't that high-- industrial use mainly. If the US government banned the sale of diamonds for non-industrial uses, DeBeers (and a chunk of the jewelry industry) would collapse, but the overall economy would be OK. Banning the industrial uses would hurt more, and probably trigger a recession, but not a total economic collapse.
Oil, on the other hand, has many uses -- fuel, plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks probably heading the list. Furthermore, in economic terms, there are NO elasticly substitutable replacements for it, and an exponentially growing demand as China and India become fully industrialized. Since conventional biodiesel relies on petroleum fertilizers and machinery, the "best" elastic replacement is sythetic petroleum from coal, probably becoming competitive in the $120/bbl to $200/bbl range. In the good (?!?) news, this means base (untaxed) gas prices can't do much more than triple from current levels, so we shouldn't go over $10/gallon for gasoline for about 30 years after peak oil (given the vast US coal reserves). The bad news is that the ecologic impacts are higher... which might require higher gas taxes to deal with the impact.
In addition, OPEC (and other cartel) quotas are not the primary limit on supply at this point — although they may be getting rich off it for the moment. Supply today is mainly limited the finite known reserves (with new discoveries having peaked pre-1970), and by current production rate limits (which is why a hurricane in the Gulf caused a price spike of oil to over $70/bbl). OPEC is pretty much pumping as hard as it can now.
Diamond prices are indeed deeply controlled by deliberate supply controls, and there have been times when oil prices were influenced that way, but right now, the price of oil is pure unrestricted supply and demand... where supply is running out.
(Why, yes, I am one of those "Peak Oil" kooks. Pleased ta meetcha.)
If this is true and can be proven, then the money trail should be followed and used to prosecute those who provided the money incentive for this virus.
IANAL, but conspiracy charges might be able to stick.
Slashdot Mirror
And of which it should be noted: The phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954. The original form from 1892 lacked the phrase — and was written by a Baptist Minister. (Admittedly, he later abandoned his parish when pressured of his sermons' political content, and stopped attending church in his retirement due to a perception of racial bigotry there.)
and my oath to this country which ended "so help me God", someone that I don't know whether he/she exists or not
Such additions are a personal preference; the President has traditionally made this addition as well, but the oath specified in Article 2, Section 1 does not so end. Accomodation (usually omitting it) is usually made for atheists giving such an oath who have objections to the phrase, under the religious test rule from Article 6. "Legally", I believe it's considered the addition of a public but personal prayer after taking such an oath. Which is not a bad tradition, all in all.
At least I'm willing to admit I'm wrong.
And willing to listen.
Almost. The decision was 9-0... which is not quite the same thing. Two separate concurrences with the main opinion were filed; everyone agreed that Grokster was run by a bunch of Jackasses who deserved to get exactly what they have coming, but the question of what should happen to the next fellow trying to rely with better faith on Sony was a little more divided.
It would take some serious work to find the last completely unanimous decision (without separate concurrence) that came from the SCOTUS. And there were cases in the 1800's where each justice filed a separate opinion....
A point I will conceed. Alas, George Bush isn't even close to being a John Adams, as a study of their mutual efforts pre-presidency will reveal. Adams at least had a height to fall from, to make his failures more tragic than farce.
Gee, it seems that Jefferson and Madison were religion neutral as well.
The "withered little apple-John" was a proponent of keeping church and state well separate, and Mister Jefferson was anything but neutral to established religion, albeit perhaps on amicable terms with his creator. If the people wish to place menorah, crosses, and mistletoe-strewn oak trees amidst the public square, that is all well and good... but for the nation, state, city, or school board to do so is another. (Yes, I've read the Koran. I prefer The Principia Discordia before bedtime, but own copies of both on my shelves.)
For some reason, Fundamentalist Evangelicals seldom cite Jefferson, and never do so referring to the full source. =)
As for the other issues which you don't address, again the 10th Amendment covers it very nicely. If it ain't in the Constitution, a document I swore a long time ago to preserve, protect and defend and still hold to that oath despite my country breaking faith from me, it is left to the states or the people.
Article V: Amendments "shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution". Which means you're still stuck (as I noted) with Amendment 14, not to mention assorted loons empowered by Article III until and unless they quit or keel over dead.
Sorry, but try another shot at my bows.
"Mister Christian! Man the Canons!"
Oh, and by the way... Nice troll. =)
Get a TV tuner card for your computer. I saw it on CNN, CNN-HN, MSNBC, and FauxNews before I hit Slashdot and my bottle of Bourbon (in that order).
Quibble: Scalia isn't dead yet. Both he and Thomas are usually accounted more conservative and stricter constructionalists than Rhenquist. The scary part is, Rhenquist was getting to be considered a moderate.
(Clue: Rhenquist was a Nixon appointee.)
(Clue: Rhenquist didn't shift to the left.)
Dude, Rhenquist's death is not going to help any prospects for whatever he's on getting any more legal.
Maybe if we get a lot more Democrats in 2008, Carter will get to pull a Taft.
And maybe peanuts will fly without foil wrappers....
I believe it was the SCOTUS Nomination Blog that was speculating that Bush might nominate O'Connor to become Chief, back when everyone thought Renquist would be the first to announce stepping down. (I almost said "would be the first to leave"... but he was. O'Connor's resignation is not final until her replacement is appointed.) There was speculation immediately afterward that she might be brought back for the Chief's spot later on. Considering she is leaving for family reasons, I deem this unlikely, barring the (not anticipated) death of her husband, or a (less anticipated) cure for his Alzheimers.
I'm deeply terrified the new chief will be Gonzales, barring direct divine intervention.
Ah, you want someone on the court who when necessary is capable of throwing questions like "what percentage of Web sites are incapable of using this CGI script, do you think?" at lawyers who waste The Court's time.
They may be assholes. They may be fossils. They may be lawyers even. But by God, there is not a one of them who is STUPID. (Which last detail caught both sides by an unseemly amount of suprise during Reno v. ACLU; try feeding Dick & Jane to someone who expects Dickens & Bronte and see how they react.) And they are far from oblivious to the modern world around them.
Being liberal-to-libertarian, I'm hoping that Bush nominates some withered old ancient... so another Renquist-type change is more likely all the sooner. However, given Roberts is only 50, it seems unlikely Bush will be that stupid.
Liberals sit to the left. Conservatives sit to the right. Libertarians are the clowns swinging from the chandeliers. (Heard from a libertarian.)
Here we go again with this old debate....
Yes, the founders of the United States believed in God -- but this makes them Deists, not necessarily Christians. The Declaration of Independence does indeed speak of "Nature's God", and refer to mankind being "endowed by their Creator" -- but makes no mention of Christianity.
Furthermore, NOWHERE in the Constitution do the words "God" or "Christ" appear — a point oft considered conspicuous by omission in favor of "We The People". Rather, specific references are made to separate church and state, requiring within the constituion proper "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States", and in the Bill of Rights opening with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
Add in the evidence of the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli as ratified by Congress and as published with little stir in the Press (albeit not as drafted at the treaty table!) which declared "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." , leads one to believe the Founders were doing their utmost to drag the United States away from the sectarian bloodshed that had divided Europe -- and particularly England -- for centuries.
Jefferson is the source of the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" that the religious right so detest; a man who removed all references to the miracles from his personal transcription of the Gospels; and who felt that his authorship of the Stature of Virginia for Religious Freedom one of the accomplishments most worthy for noting in his epitaph. Living in Charlottesville and having recently visited Monticello, I feel obliged to assure you that the persistent ground vibrations you can feel standing in front of his tombstone is not the rumble of a passing truck, but Mister Jefferson spinning in his grave from Bush's Presidency. =)
As for your assertion on abortion, while your position is better founded, I suggest you read the actual Roe v. Wade ruling all the way through; your assertion about the rights of the states in the 10th Amendment falls aside explicitly to the later "Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment"... although the court might reasonably revisit such a question, given the strained reasoning used. This makes the abortion war yet another twisted legacy of the debate over our former "peculiar institution."
As to your prime assertion on the legal import of the intent of the founding fathers, I suggest you read Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace"... plus a good more of the biographies of those colorful, contestous, and amazingly human founders of ours. Leaving aside Lessig's points on unaddressed assumptions, suggesting they ever had a single unified intent is a slander to their memories and to what they achieved in their struggle to unify in common cause.
It's obviously not being given to those at higher levels... or some people who think that because they set company policy, they can then ignore company policy.
Arm, leg, neck, or nose?
Disclaimer: That is a joke. The man needs anger management therapy, not a physical assault.
Incorrect. Merely calling for a boycott is not necessarily enough, and most companies can poll well enough to realize if their conduct is likely to trigger people deciding on a widespread boycott, and moderate their practices enough to defuse such situations. On rare occasions where it does get bad enough for a boycott, the company quickly takes steps to address the cause.
It's similar to tactics which have been weakening organized labor for decades. Of course, there's the risk of building up enough widespread difuse resentment to trigger major social upheaval, which as a rule is bad for business. But with the dumbing down of America, those with the ability to organize such change generally find it easier these days to take steps to benefit themselves personally.
No help; I believe this is idiosyncratic to TOME, which forked off circa 2001-2002. The patent application reportedly was filed in 2000... meaning this is not prior art. Come to think of it, I don't know when it was added to Nethack.
I've criticized the technical merits of some of those... especially when Malkin started blogging about one appearing on some Arab nutjob site, and various other idiots started being even stupider. I had three years majoring in nuclear engineering, prior to dropping out from loss of interest — all of the really interesting problems left in the field are political, and was getting depressed by constantly looking at that aspect.
I could do a better job describing how to build a nuke; my playing around with conventional explosives is pretty limited.
I'm not sure how you'd actually rig the primer for such a Kaboom bay; when my freinds played with thermite a few times, we mostly used a thin magnesium strip sticking out of a wad of strike-anywhere matches, with another match at the end pointing the other way for a fuse. And the folks talking about water dissociation may be right; we mostly worked on an ex-building's concrete slab foundation... which we ruined even more. A concrete slab is often not conveniently close in many apartment buildings — just inconveniently accessible. =)
Custom built 5.25" bay metal box, front side key locked switch controlling 12v powered spark igniter for magnesium primer charge; remainder of the box filled with thermite. Install in the computer's top bay. You can generally get all the way through at least eight drives that way, but if you have vertical mount drives, you'll want a second kaboom bay in the lowest 5.25 bay. Have a good UPS, and have a metal-bottomed water tank below the computer (camoflage as an overclock device), because that much thermite does NOT stop quickly.
They can pry my PGP key from my computer's cold dead... um, slag. =)
Or engineering? After all, if ya canna change the laws of physics, where's the fun in it?
Monkey see, monkey do....
And no, I don't work for these people. I just think they make some nifty geek toys.
No, that's not why I have SCSI drives on my home server. Honest; it's for the RAID performance....
Cthulhu fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
OK, unleashing the Old Ones to devour your competitors is a little unscrupulous, but at least it's not unleashing lawyers.
(And yeah, there's some prior art in Angband and other roguelikes, but I think it's more binary (off/on) than progressive in effect. There might be some substance to the patent.)
Not with proper preparation. About 300 grams of thermite, one magnesium-based Hurricane Match, a liter of water, a getaway car; 90 seconds and it's mine. (KIDS! Don't try this at home!)
Of course, there are often more amusing things to do with that combination of ingredients.
A gross distortion — about oil. You are basically right about diamonds. While he may overhype matters somewhat, Epstein's classic book documents how the diamond cartel has been ruthless in its limit of supply to a value-sustaining level of marketing-created demand. If supply were to float free, diamonds would drop sharply in price. Furthermore, their intrinsic value within the economy isn't that high-- industrial use mainly. If the US government banned the sale of diamonds for non-industrial uses, DeBeers (and a chunk of the jewelry industry) would collapse, but the overall economy would be OK. Banning the industrial uses would hurt more, and probably trigger a recession, but not a total economic collapse.
Oil, on the other hand, has many uses -- fuel, plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks probably heading the list. Furthermore, in economic terms, there are NO elasticly substitutable replacements for it, and an exponentially growing demand as China and India become fully industrialized. Since conventional biodiesel relies on petroleum fertilizers and machinery, the "best" elastic replacement is sythetic petroleum from coal, probably becoming competitive in the $120/bbl to $200/bbl range. In the good (?!?) news, this means base (untaxed) gas prices can't do much more than triple from current levels, so we shouldn't go over $10/gallon for gasoline for about 30 years after peak oil (given the vast US coal reserves). The bad news is that the ecologic impacts are higher... which might require higher gas taxes to deal with the impact.
In addition, OPEC (and other cartel) quotas are not the primary limit on supply at this point — although they may be getting rich off it for the moment. Supply today is mainly limited the finite known reserves (with new discoveries having peaked pre-1970), and by current production rate limits (which is why a hurricane in the Gulf caused a price spike of oil to over $70/bbl). OPEC is pretty much pumping as hard as it can now.
Diamond prices are indeed deeply controlled by deliberate supply controls, and there have been times when oil prices were influenced that way, but right now, the price of oil is pure unrestricted supply and demand... where supply is running out.
(Why, yes, I am one of those "Peak Oil" kooks. Pleased ta meetcha.)
IANAL, but conspiracy charges might be able to stick.