In the brave new world of the 21st century, no one is to blame for anything. That's what we took from the indelicate photo of the naked fat lady on last week's cover of Le Monde. At first, we thought it was an ad for liposuction. No, obesity, said the caption provided by the French public health service, is nothing to be ashamed of. "It is not anyone's fault. Nor is it unavoidable."

"Wait a minute," said Henry at the dinner table, troubled by the dialectic of it. "If it is not unavoidable, then you must be able to avoid it." So, if you don't avoid it, who's fault is it but your own?" Henry is studying logic in school; sometimes, we think we should have kept him at home.

Many people are "addicted" to overeating, explained the accompanying commentary. Eventually, they become obese.

"Why don't they just stop eating so much?" the 15-year-old wanted to know.

"Because they are addicted," explained his mother. "Like people who smoke or drink."

"But people stop smoking all the time!" replied Henry. He wasn't giving up.

"Yes, but it takes a lot of willpower," said his mother.

"Hmmm. You mean that people who are addicted to something lose control over themselves, so they don't have enough willpower to stop it even when they don't want to do it. But a lot of people do stop. So if they really don't want to do it, they just stop doing it, whether they're addicted or not? And I guess if you held a gun to a fat lady's head and said you were going to blow her brains out if she didn't stop eating so much, she'd probably find the willpower to stop...right?

"In other words, if people really don't want to be addicted to something, then they find the willpower to stop being addicted, which sounds to me like they really could have stopped all along, and if they didn't, it's their own fault."

"Oh Henry, not everything can be reduced to simple logic."

Addiction rises above logic, like rings of smoke over a burning Porsche. No point in talking to the mob that lit the match. And there is no point trying to make sense of George W. Bush's comment in his State of the Union address. "America is addicted to oil," the president observed.

America likes oil. She finds it useful. But is she addicted? Could she "just say no" if she wanted to? We don't know, but we suspect that if oil were much more expensive, she would use less of it. We hardly think the raddled old dame needs to check into a dry-out clinic or sign up for a 12-step program yet. Just let the market put the gun of higher prices to her head.

Americans could reduce their consumption of oil if they really wanted to. When they really want to quit, they will. And here we offer a leap of logic, an exuberant hunch, and a wild instinctive guess: The more expensive oil becomes, the less of it they are likely to consume.

We say that from on our own observations, as well as from basic economic theory. A friend recently bought a very fancy BMW. This is not one of those namby-pamby politically correct cars; it's a real old fashioned gas-guzzler. It gets about nine miles to the gallon, he said proudly. About the same mileage as the first car I ever owned - 40 years ago. See, some things never change.

At the margin, gasoline is an important part of the family budget. And at the margin, there is plenty of room for reduction. Our friend could have turned on NPR, bought a hybrid and smugly turned up his nose at SUV drivers. If the price of gasoline had hurt him enough, he would have.

Isn't nature beautiful? Have you noticed? Stunning starlets do not marry hopeless, poverty-stricken losers, do they? Why not? Nature! People do not make soup out of old sneakers or put watermelons on their heads. Why? There is no law against it. But nature has laws of her own! And guess what else. Ceteris paribus, people use less oil when the price rises. That's what natural, free markets do. They "regulate" the use of nature's resources. The more rare, more valuable something is, the higher the price. Fewer people can afford it. So, less of it is "consumed." It is the majesty of these free and natural markets - like the spread of a peacock's feathers, or the march of lemmings to their own suicide - that conservative politicians used to admire, if not protect. Everything happens so naturally, so relentlessly, and so seamlessly; there is no need to make a federal case out of it.

But here comes our president, with another campaign to improve nature. We gasp at the chutzpah of it. Our jaw drops at the appalling arrogance. We chuckle at the conceit behind and the consequences ahead. It is not enough for consumers to adjust their habits according to their own whims and circumstances, says George W. Bush; we need to set a national goal of replacing 75 percent of the nation's Middle East oil imports by 2025 with ethanol and other energy sources.

Why not 76%? Why not leave it to Americans individually to decide how much Middle East oil they want to buy? Why does the "market" work for jellybeans and patent medicine, but not for oil? We will not wait for an answer.

Replacing 75% of U.S. oil imports from the Mideast by 2025, writes our Daily Reckoning oilman, Byron King, is not a "goal," it is a prophecy. There is no way that the United States will be importing as much oil from the Mideast in 2025 as it imports today. The United States will not be importing much in the way of petroleum from the Mideast, nor from anyplace else. The oil just will not be there for one side to export, nor will it be there for the other side to import. Welcome to the future.

The big E. The world is running out of cheap Energy. Kuwait has announced that its main oil field, the super giant Burgan, has entered the phase of irreversible decline, Byron continues. At current depletion and decline rates, by 2025 Kuwait will be exporting negligible amounts of oil, and at prices that most nations of the world will be unable to afford.

The planners, who are connecting the dots of the past and mechanistically extrapolating out into the future with no allowance for Peak Oil, are living in a fantasyland. They are planning, if anything, for the failure of the American economy and the attendant decline of American civilization.

*** And now switch to another Big E:

The experiment with a pure paper money system edges towards its inevitable, ineluctable, irresistible conclusion. Name one paper money that has lasted more than 100 years. You can't do it, can you, dear reader? No, you can't, because the longest-lived pure paper currencies are the one we use today. The dollar, and most other major currencies, have only been completely free from gold backing since 1971.

Will the dollar last another 10 years? Another 20 years? Another 50 years? We don't know, but even at the present modest rate of loss, the dollar will lose another half of its value by the year 2025. That will make the 1910-dollar worth about two-and-a-half cents.

Can you count on this slow, steady sinking of the dollar bill, or will it suddenly turn up its bow and slip below the waves before you have a chance to reach the lifeboats?
We don't know. So, we wear our life vests as if they were football jackets. Gold is back to levels not seen for two decades. And now, silver too, reached a 19-year high last week.

Soon, Americans will be addicted to both metals. But don't blame us!

*** And more views from sunny South Florida

"I know it's over," continued our friend with the BMW. "I've made a lot of money in real estate. But it's getting soft now. I can tell. And I'm just trying to get out of the speculative stuff as fast as I can before it melts down. But, of course, it can melt down faster than I can get out. That's what I'm worried about."

On the wrong side of the tracks, literally, our son rents an apartment. The place is so near the tracks themselves we were awakened by the sound of a freight train at 5:00 am, just in time to get up to write The Daily Reckoning. It sounded as though the train was coming through the living room.

The apartment itself is bright and sunny. It is also a real estate investor's dream, in that it is a "loft" style place, which is to say, the developer didn't bother to add any finishes. The walls and ceilings are made of cement. The surfaces are either metal or concrete. It's the latest thing; you can find hundreds of such industrial lofts today in any major city in the United States...or abroad.

This would sell for about $600,000, we were told. But there is no reason to buy. There are a lot of these places that are empty. It's easy to rent and the rent is fairly low. We only pay $2,400 a month, and we got the first month free. That means the owner is getting a gross yield of only about 4%. How is he paying his mortgage? Upkeep? Taxes? Condo fees? Unless the price goes up, he will lose money at about 10% per year.

"I think a lot of these places were bought by speculators. They were hoping the prices would go up, but they're building apartments like this all over town. God knows where all the buyers are going to come from," our son explained.

We looked out the balcony and saw a freight train rushing behind a building just like ours, but in that building, only about half the units had lights on. In the parking lot of our own building, only about a quarter of the spaces had cars in them. People had moved down here to get new lives - new style, new cars, new place, new weather, new girlfriends. But here, it seemed as though there was no life at all.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing.  For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.