Crazy 8 Summit

Every summer our family used to get together for the traditional family picnic in the park. Among the many activities the adults planned for the kids and for themselves were games. The kids would amuse themselves with a lot of physical challenges, while the adults settled in for a game or two of Cribbage or Crazy Eights.
 
The object of the card game, Crazy Eights, is to get rid of all your cards to a discard pile. The first person to do so wins the hand. Points are added to every player who's still holding cards and the player with the fewest points wins the game.
 
With the G8 Summit this past week, I couldn't help but think of it much like the summer pastime. It was a meeting of eight leaders trying to discard their responsibilities into a pile. I'm thinking in purely political terms as each country shrugged off its responsibilities in the volatile region known as The Middle East.  No mention of Africa on the agenda. No open talks about peak oil but plenty of rhetoric regarding Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Perhaps the view from St. Petersburg was too ideal.
 
The key to the summit was the guest list: leaders from Mexico, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. All of these nations have vital interests in the future of Oil, the biggest trading commodity among them. China complained about the rising prices, while Russia signed a deal to pump Natural Gas from Kazakhstan's giant Karachaganak gas field. And they all agreed, "on the 'urgency' of protecting the world's energy infrastructure from terrorist attacks." And thereby lies the current state of military activities around the world and specifically in the oil rich region the United States currently occupies like Iraq. [Wars are territorial, after all]
 
The G8 or Crazy 8, as I like to call them, also agreed not to expand membership. This exclusive club makes the strict rules of the game even at the exclusion of China, India and Brazil, two of the biggest oil consumers in the world and one small producer. Clearly, they were only interested in maintaining the status quo and to politically discard these nations to the pile. As usual, nobody wanted to be left holding cards at the end of the summit.
 
I didn't know Crazy Eights was such a high stakes game.
 
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong.