THE POPE’S WAR
It’s not a religious war, according to His Holiness. Economic, yes. Political, sure. But not religious, because religious people want peace. “It’s not right to identify Islam with terrorism.” That’s what he said to journalists on his plane to Auschwitz. Really.
Pope Francis is very ecumenical, you see. And he remembers what happened to his predecessor when Benedict accurately analyzed the differences between Christianity and Islam. You remember, don’t you?
He was pilloried by the politically correct crowd. The Church intelligentsia backed away from the Pope, launched a campaign of ecumenism with the Moslem world, and that was pretty much that.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when Pope Francis says that while the world is at war, it certainly isn’t a religious war. This just a few days after an elderly Catholic priest was murdered in his church in France, by radical Moslems who were careful to stage it in such a way as to dramatize its religious basis.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE EPIC SAUDI FAIL AND THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN INGENUITY
OPEC's worst fears are coming true. Twenty months after Saudi Arabia took the fateful decision to flood world markets with oil, it has still failed to break the back of the US shale industry.
The Saudi-led Gulf states have certainly succeeded in killing off a string of global mega-projects in deep waters. Investment in upstream exploration from 2014 to 2020 will be $1.8 trillion less than previously assumed, according to consultants IHS. But this is a bitter victory at best.
America's hydraulic frackers are cutting costs so fast that most can now produce at prices far below levels needed to fund the Saudi welfare state and its military machine, or to cover OPEC budget deficits.
Scott Sheffield, the outgoing chief of Pioneer Natural Resources, threw down the gauntlet last Thursday (7/28) -- claiming that his pre-tax production costs in the Permian Basin of West Texas have fallen to $2 a barrel.
"Definitely we can compete with anything that Saudi Arabia has. We have the best rock," he said. Revolutionary improvements in drilling technology and data analytics that have changed the cost calculus faster than almost anybody thought possible.
PUTIN AND MRS. CLINTON
Did the Russians hack the emails of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton?
The answer is almost certainly “yes,” but that does not mean that the DNC and other emails were released on behalf of the Kremlin to help Donald Trump. The basis for my skepticism of the charge that the email dumps were ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin is as follows.
To begin with, I am no fan of Mr. Putin and the Russian government, as I was subjected to Russian-Bulgarian disinformation campaigns; because of my high-profile work on the economic transition in Bulgaria and Russia in the early 1990s; and my expose of Russia payments to members of the Bulgarian Parliament to support the now-abandoned proposed gas pipeline from Russia to Bulgaria 2 years ago.
Consider that the Clintons have been covert financial allies of Mr. Putin for a number of years. They are allies in environmentalism’s war on fossil fuels (the more expensive oil is, the more billions he makes). Consider the New York Times front-page story of April 23, 2015: Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.
So here are some questions to ponder.
ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE AMAZON
News Alert:
An Islamophobic study finds that howler monkeys scream louder when they have smaller testicles
A group of bigoted "biological anthropologists" from England’s Cambridge University have recently come up with a study comparing the size of a howler monkey's vocal tract and the size of his testicles.
To wit, pictures of howler monkeys must have been specifically selected to remind viewers of news footage taken at Moslem Brotherhood rallies and protests. Additionally, the researchers' snide comments further reveal their Islamophobic bias:
HALF-FULL REPORT 07/29/16
So it’s come to this. The most powerful, the most moral in its founding principles, the most prosperous and successful nation in the history of humanity has to choose between an egomaniacal buffoon and an evil crook to lead it.
Kafka himself couldn’t dream up the irony. We are forced to choose between two lunacies and it’s a no-brainer. We have to take a chance with the buffoon in order to stop the evil.
Just how evil is the person who has so justly earned the sobriquet of PIAPS – Pig In A Pants Suit? Let me tell you a story….
The bottom line here is that Trump is an amateur, a piker, a nobody in the scandal department compared to Hillary. No matter how much dirt she and the media dump on him over the next three months, it’s a molehill next to the Mons Olympus of Clinton Corruption.
There’s Benghazi-gate and Email-gate among so many others, but the real jaw-dropper is the Clinton Foundation combining treason and greed to a level beyond belief. Here’s a summary from Wednesday (7/27) on the current IRS investigation of the Clinton Foundation….
In my Stillicide article yesterday (7/28), I pointed out that “the best thing Trump has going for him is a lack of fear of envy.” That’s why he’s not intimidated by guilt-mongering and doesn’t pay obeisance to political correctness. It’s the most necessary, albeit not fully sufficient, condition for standing up to the Left.
And Islamofascism. On Tuesday (7/26), two piles of Islamic excrement butchered a Catholic priest in his church in Normandy, France in the name of Allah. In response, French President Hollande vowed to “wage war by every means” upon the Moslems of ISIS. With a Moslem population of 10% (6.3 million out of 63 million) in France, brave words by lily-livered French weenies mean nothing.
It’s worse in Germany because Angela Merkel is the world’s poster child for the fear of being envied. Elsewhere in Europe, however, a revolt against Islamofascism is growing. You’ll be stunned by this photo-essay depicting it…
We close with the morally magnificent achievement of our Hero of the Week.
THE LEFT’S STILLICIDAL STRATEGY TO DESTROY AMERICA
Let me introduce a new word into your vocabulary, a word that encapsulates the Left’s strategy to demolish every institution of American culture and the traditional values of American society.
The word is stillicide. The dictionary definition has nothing to do with politics, nor does it refer to some form of killing like suicide, genocide, homicide et al. It refers rather to a physical process derived from the Latin stillicidium: stilla, drops, plus cidium, a declension of cadere, to fall.
Stillicide, stilliciduous, stillicidal thus refer to “a continual dripping of water falling in drops.”
How about that for a light bulb going on in your head?
It sure explains, just to take one example, why race relations in America have gotten worse, far worse, after Zero’s election in 2008.
Why have Zero and his minions in the media done everything they could to divide us on race instead of uniting us, culminating today in the fascist thuggery of Only Black Lives Matter and the murder epidemic of white cops?
Because the hideous secret hidden in every Leftie soul is….
AN UNFATHOMABLE NOVEMBER
The Democrat National Committee collaborated with the Clinton campaign to sabotage Bernie Sanders, emails published by Wikileaks on the eve of the Dem convention indicated.
The news infuriated Sanders supporters, already grumpy because Hillary selected Sen. Tim Kaine, D-VA., who is what passes for a “moderate” among Democrats these days.
The firestorm swiftly consumed Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, D-FL, the DNC Chair, who was canned and blew town before the convention was gaveled in. Then in a stunning display of cluelessness, callousness, or both, Hillary made Debbie Dimwit honorary co-chair of her campaign.
Every mention of Hillary’s name Monday (7/25) was booed, beginning with the benediction (!). Some Sanders supporters chanted “lock her up,” as Republicans had in Cleveland.
Here’s a heads-up: Donald Trump will run as if he were in a Democrat primary. He’ll be to Hillary’s left on some economic issues, in sync with her on most social issues. He’ll aim his pitch at Sanders supporters, and the white working class Democrats abandoned. Witness yesterday (7/26) his advocating raising the minimum wage in total ignorance of basic economics.
OBAMA’S WAR ALLIANCE WITH IRAN EXPOSED
For those who thought that America was stealthily pulling out of the Middle East in pursuit of a policy of gradual disengagement pursued by Obama, a shocking truth is beginning to unfold. Far from disengaging, the Obama administration has for some time now actually been forming a de facto alliance with Iran in its war against the Sunni Arabs. Exploiting the conflict against Daesh (ISIS) as an opportunity to ethnically cleanse the Sunni Arab population of al-Anbar and other provinces in Iraq, the Iranian regime has poured military personnel and resources into the sixty separate and predominantly Shi’ite militias operating in that country.
These militias, commanded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Qods Force leader – General Qassem Soleimani – have arrested, tortured, butchered and beheaded many thousands of innocent Sunni men and even boys, during their fight to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah.
The next target for the Iranian-backed militias is Mosul, Iran’s second largest city and home to over two million Sunnis. American airstrikes have already begun around the outskirts. An unprecedented human catastrophe will quickly develop unless the West wakes up and exposes Obama’s duplicity.
The only way to combat Daesh (ISIS) is to recruit and engage the Sunni tribes in Iraq. They are best placed to root out the Daesh terrorists who have occupied their homeland for the past two years. But the Sunni tribal leaders have good grounds to believe that America has now joined forces with Iran to wage war on the Sunni Arabs and they will be reluctant to help a coalition that may inevitably lead to their own destruction at the hands of sectarian Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias.
OIL IS HERE TO STAY AND SO IS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Oil rigs in the Permian Basin of Texas are still being built even at $45 oil, defying shale skeptics
Oil prices have tumbled to a three-month low as surging supply once again exposes the chronic global glut and threatens to perpetuate the energy slump for another year.
US crude contracts crashed through key technical barriers to $42.40 yesterday (7/26) before recovering slightly in late trading on profit-taking. They have fallen by 9% over the last four sessions.
Speculators have given it an extra push. Data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the US shows that 52 hedge funds have taken out large short positions, betting that the summer sell-off still has a further leg to run.
Prices are unlikely to re-test the February lows of $26 when asset prices were tumbling across the world and markets were in a full-blown ‘China panic,’ pricing in a global recession that never happened.
The latest oil tremors reveal little about the underlying health of the global economy, which has so far shrugged off Brexit fears and may be accelerating.
A REGULATORY PLAGUE – IN TEXAS??
All plagues, whether they are biological or destructive policy ideas, begin at some specific place and time. The city of Austin, Texas, is now the place of origin of what could be a very costly experiment. (Yes, Texas – which is a Red State overall, but the people who run Austin, like Houston, are Hyper-Blue –JW.)
Unneeded and ill-considered regulation is annoying, costly and damaging, and it fuels corruption. Those in the political class love to regulate. They love the power regulation gives them over their fellow citizens.
They love the fact that the threat to regulate causes the potentially affected to make campaign donations, or provide speaking fees or gifts to avoid having the regulation imposed.
They love the fact that promising to maintain or “enhance” a regulation causes the beneficiaries (often big business) to keep the payoff money flowing to them.
Those who have jobs in regulatory agencies have many incentives to keep the number of regulations ever-growing as a way of obtaining more job security, status and power. In sum, much of the regulatory apparatus is fundamentally corrupt and destructive. This is what’s happening in Austin.