In the US shale gas is old hat; it's the shale oil revolution that's proving a world changer, promising not just lower oil prices worldwide, but geopolitical ripples as America weans itself off oil imports and perhaps loses interest in the Middle East. One of the pioneers of the shale gas revolution, Chris Wright, of Liberty Resources, was in Britain last month. It was he and his colleagues at Pinnacle Technologies who reinvented hydraulic fracturing in the late 1990s in a way that unlocked the vast petroleum resources in shale. Within seven years the Barnett shale, in and around Forth Worth, Texas, was producing half as much gas as the whole of Britain consumes. And the Barnett proved to be a baby compared with other shales. Like many shale entrepreneurs, Mr. Wright is now spending a lot of time in North Dakota drilling for oil. The success of America's shale gas revolution drove the gas price so low that in 2010 most drilling rigs switched to looking for oil. With spectacular results. A new report (The Shale Oil Boom: a US Phenomenon) by Leonardo Maugeri of Harvard University, sets out just how astonishing this second shale revolution already is.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

What is going on in Egypt is simply astounding.  The pictures -such as those of this UPI story, are jaw-dropping.  Especially when you consider what millions upon millions of Egyptians are demonstrating against:  radical Islamism and Sharia law which they equate with fascist tyranny. Who or what is behind these gigantic protests?  An amorphous movement called Tamarod, meaning "Rebel" or "Rebellion" in Arabic.  Its goal is the resignation of President Morsi and the removal of the Moslem Brotherhood from power, followed by new elections. Now, here's what almost no one gets so far:  The Tamarod movement is Egypt's Tea Party.  Both are anti-fascist freedom movements.  Of course, the US Tea Parties have a far deeper and more solid foundation - the US Constitution and the demand for the federal government to limit itself to the Constitution's enumerated powers. Nonetheless, what is happening in Egypt should inspire all Tea Partyers in America.  If tens of millions of Egyptians can demand the resignation of their corrupt fascist leader, why can't tens of millions of Americans do the same? Well, then, why aren't they?  Americans have the greatest tradition of freedom in human history.  Egyptians don't have any at all.  So why aren't vast numbers of Americans in the streets demanding their freedom from the federalie fascisti, led by an irretrievably corrupt president who hates their country?  What does it take? Maybe it takes George Zimmerman getting acquitted.

[Note: Yesterday, June 26, the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Windsor, ruling 5-4 that DOMA, The Defense of Marriage Act, is unconstitutional.  Justice Kennedy provided the decisive vote, siding with the Court's four dependably liberal justices, Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia dissented.  The link above is to the Pdf file of the entire decision, which is where the Scalia dissent is to be found.  TTP here presents, as a public service, the extraordinary dissent of Justice Scalia in its entirety, of over 8,000 words, in easily readable form.  It is quite possibly the most blistering, scathing moral denunciation of a majority opinion by a dissenting justice in Supreme Court history. He condemns the Court majority for "formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency," for accusing "the Congress that enacted this (Defense of Marriage) law and the President who signed it of... act(ing) with malice - with the ‘purpose to disparage and injure' same-sex couples." Scalia is stunned by the majority's vitriol at "simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence-indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race." This is a brilliant exercise in judicial, constitutional, and moral reasoning.  It is worth reading entire. -JW]   This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today's opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court's errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.

If you want to know what's wrong with the Republican Party wrapped up in one pretty package, all you have to do is look at the latest amnesty disaster that was created by a gang of Republican idiots in the Senate. Marco Rubio, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker, John Hoeven, Kelly Ayotte, Dean Heller and the rest of the braindead Senate Republican buffoons who have supported this bill are the living personification of the words, "Stuck on Stupid." They picked the wrong issue, at the wrong time, did it the wrong way, and set it up so that no matter what happens, the Republican Party is doomed to get kicked in the teeth. Why does the Republican Party lose elections? Because they do things like this:

Just like they did with Obamacare, some in Congress intend to "Pelosi" the amnesty bill. They'll pass it in order to find out what's in it. And just like the unpopular, unaffordable Obamacare disaster, this pandering, rewarding-the-rule-breakers, still-no-border-security, special-interests-ridden, 24-lb disaster of a bill is not supported by informed Americans. I am an ardent supporter of legal immigration. I'm proud that our country is so desirable that it has been a melting pot making a diverse people united as the most exceptional nation on earth for over two centuries. But I join every American with an ounce of common sense insisting that any discussion about immigration must center on a secure border. The amnesty bill before the Senate is completely toothless on border security. If this bill was genuinely concerned with border security, it might include practical solutions for those states that live with the problem every single day. Pass-through grants could be given to border states to actually build a fence.  Free up more federal lands along the border to be privatized. There are plenty of other commonsense solutions, but this bill isn't about fixing problems; it's about amnesty at all costs.  What's more, passing this bill with an unsecured border and within a growing welfare state under Barack Obama is economic insanity.

Note:  Elbert Guillory is a State Senator in the legislature of Louisiana.  A graduate of Rutgers Law School, he has been a practicing attorney in Opelousas for many years, and turned to politics in his 60s - elected as a State Representative in 2007, then State Senator in 2009 as a Democrat.  Opelousas is heavily black and Democrat. On May 31, he formally switched his party affiliation to the Republican Party, becoming the first black Republican in the Louisiana Senate since Reconstruction in the 1870s.  He is widely considered now to be a formidable candidate for Lt. Governor in 2015. Guillory calls himself a "Frederick Douglass Republican."  Here is his explanation.  It brought tears to my eyes, and it may well to yours.  - Jack Wheeler {youtube}n_YQ8560E1w{/youtube}

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. As a Whistleblower like me, he became discomforted by what he was exposed to and what he saw: the industrial-scale systematic surveillance that is scooping up vast amounts of information not only around the world but in the United States, in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution. I feel a kinship with Snowden: he is essentially the equivalent of me. He saw the surveillance state from within and saw how far it's gone. The government has a pathological incentive to collect more and more and more; they just can't help themselves - they have an insatiable hoarding complex. Since the government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out. There's no room in a democracy for this kind of secrecy: it's anathema to our form of a constitutional republic, which was born out of the struggle to free ourselves from the abuse of such powers, which led to the American Revolution. That is what's at stake here: to an NSA with these unwarranted powers, we're all potentially guilty; we're all potential suspects until we prove otherwise. That is what happens when the government has all the data. 

Shortly before the second-term inauguration of Barack Obama this January, I wrote the following of my worries over the Obama way of doing business:

But the untruths and hypocrisy hover in the partisan atmosphere and incrementally and insidiously undermine each new assertion that we hear from the president - some of them perhaps necessary and logical. Indeed, the more emphatically he adds "make no mistake about it," "let me be perfectly clear," "I'm not kidding," or the ubiquitous "me," "my," and "I" to each new assertion, the more a growing number of people will come to know from the past that what follows simply is not true. Does this matter? Yes, because when the reckoning comes, it will be seen as logical rather than aberrant - and long overdue.

It isn't often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a big rethink thanks to the discovery that antibodies, which combat viruses, work not just outside cells but inside them as well. The star of this new view is a protein molecule called TRIM21. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the body fights off infection in two separate ways. First is the adaptive immune system, which works outside the cell. It generates antibodies to intercept specific invaders, locking onto them like a tracking missile and preventing them from entering the cell. A second line of defense, the innate immune system, operates within the cell; it is like an expansive air-defense network, blasting away at all invaders. Three years ago work by Leo James, William McEwan and their colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge revealed that this understanding was incomplete. They found that the neutralization of adenoviruses (common viruses causing colds and other infections) by antibodies was happening mainly inside the cell, not outside, and by an unexpected mechanism. This mechanism opens a whole new path to curing viral infections, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.

WASHINGTON -President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has "played no role whatsoever" in the U.S. government over the past four years. "Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am," he said. "Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization." The President's outrage only increased, he said, when he "recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice." "The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them," he said. "They sound like bad news."

Last week's Humor File was Nixon Was A Piker compared to Barrack Milhous Zero.  Like all good humor, it's funny because it's true:  Nixon was no piker in the scandal and mendacity department, but Zero is far worse. Yet, at this particular conflation of events, as we simultaneously rage at Zero's awfulness and revel in its ongoing exposure, it's useful to step back and regard what's going on in America today in the context of history and economic reality. We'll start with the case for Nixon being more destructive of our economy and freedoms than Zero, then on to the worse case regarding FDR.  For the lesson is:  it's hard to keep America down.  We go through crises and dangers, and then bounce back.  No matter how much FDR's Reds tried to support the Soviet Union, we thrived in the 1950s - and eventually got rid of the Soviet Union itself. We can see this happening right before our eyes as we suffer the Curse of Zero.  It's not just that we all have tingles of joy running up our legs over Zero being up to his jug ears in one scandal after another.  It's that, no matter how hard Zero has tried to hamstring and suffocate the American economy, he has failed.  And we can take such advantage of his failure.

The Arab Spring has unleashed the Arab Collapse. Everybody still standing in the region is picking the flesh of the helpless. The Islamist cancer proved more virulent than Arabs themselves expected, while dying regimes behave with unrestrained ruthlessness. And our diplomats still think everyone can be cajoled into harmony. We're witnessing a titanic event, the crack-up of a long-tottering civilization. Arab societies grew so corrupt and stagnant that violent upheaval became inevitable. That's what we're seeing in Syria and Iraq - two names, one struggle - and will find elsewhere tomorrow. We can't stop it, we can't fix it, and we don't understand it. But we can stay out of it.  Here's how we can and why we should.

To borrow the climactic line from Easy Rider, "We blew it." Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria's then-moderate opposition back in 2011. We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state. Now it's too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous. Strategy isn't only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the "right thing" too late often makes things worse. How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?