Enlaces para pensar - 2 de septiembre

Socialist medicine will work great! Just look at the VA! When my liberal friends tell me that government-controlled medical care is unarguably the best America could ever get, I always reply, "So show me. Fix the VA and when it is running just like you want Medicare for All to work, tell me and I will take you more seriously." Then they get mad at me.

Well, here ya go: Officials are investigating 11 suspicious deaths at a VA hospital. Two have been ruled homicides.

But wait! There's more! Horror: VA Failed To Stop Pathologist Who Misdiagnosed Thousands — And Showed Up Drunk For Work

My point is not that stuff like this never happens in our current, private hospitals. It is that government bureaucrats always protect their own, and when the medical staff becomes, basically, another group of bureaucrats, then you get more of that code of omerta, and it is protected by the bureaucracy. Remember 2015's Gold King Mine Spill, caused exclusively by federal EPA employees? How many federal bureaucrats got fired or disciplined for it? Zero.

Stanford University makes segregation official policy. Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

• In an effort to achieve “diversity” within its physics department, Stanford University is offering a separate physics course in order to ensure retention of “underrepresented” physics majors.
• The initiative also includes two other physics courses focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline.

The second bullet means that the "two other physics courses" are not actually physics courses. They are political courses. Stanford says as much:

Other courses offered to bridge the supposed diversity problem at Stanford include two one-unit physics courses that address not physics itself, but rather concepts of diversity within the discipline.

But they will count toward fulfilling a physics major, you betcha. In fact, they will soon be required for a B.S. in physics if they are not already.

Science courses used to be about, well, science. Now, like everything else the Left touches, they are increasing about political indoctrination. Not even the Soviet Union went that far.

How long will it be until you board an airliner designed by engineers whose major in aeronautical engineering had a principal focus on diversity and inclusion in engineering? Good luck with that!

"Religion is a check on moral relativism, so naturally the left hates it." Well, Left-wing politics is a religion and it does not tolerate competition. Like this: WBAP Morning News: Beto Supporters Boo Man Who Said America Needs to ‘Return to Jesus’

At a recent Town Hall event, Beto O’Rourke supporters booed a man who told the crowd that America needs to “return to Jesus” in order to heal. 

You will need counseling after clicking this link: Truly awful, idiotic, and just plain inexplicable but real kitchens in real houses. Don't say I didn't warn you. 

And then there are the living rooms. Living Room Design Fails So Bad, They'll Scare the Living Daylights Out of You

Love that it is for sale for more than one million dollars.

Shooting down drones is now easy. Well, for now. New military system could aloows soldiers to eliminate drones with one shot

With the system, the user selects and locks onto the target, and as soon as the trigger is squeezed, the system calculates the target’s movement and predicts its next location by means of advanced image processing and algorithms. SMASH 2000 prevents the bullet being fired until the target is precisely in its crosshairs.

It is also being tested by US armed forces.

"Senegal was not a hellhole." What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

Read the whole thing.

Have a great Labor Day! Even though This Labor Day, Unions Are Gunning for Workers' Free Speech Rights

Christians under genocide and American victimhood

Just last July, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt - the equivalent of our secretary of state - pointed out that Christians around the world were the most persecuted group of all.

When the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, the European nations that Brother Andrew had visited undercover won their liberty and achieved one of the greatest advances of human freedom in modern history.

Yet when I became Foreign Secretary, I learned that almost a quarter of a billion Christians were still enduring persecution around the world.

The evidence shows sadly that the situation is becoming worse. The number of countries where Christians suffer because of their faith rose from 128 in 2015 to 144 a year later. In the Middle East, the very survival of Christianity as a living religion is in doubt.

A century ago, 20% of the region’s people were Christians; today the figure is below 5%.

(On Gov.UK, "Persecution of Christians review: Foreign Secretary’s speech following the final report") Secretary Hunt went on to say that 80 percent of the world's victims of religious persecution are Christians.

And that persecution is very often, if not usually, of the murderous kind:

Mass grave of murdered Christians in Syria.
Photos like this have been taken in many other places in the world.

Now,

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) shared the report compiled by the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen. It states that violence and oppression against Christians are worsening as time goes by.

"Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity," the report states. "In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN."

The evidence shows that Christianity is "by far the most widely persecuted religion." 

Original ACLJ report is here.

Meanwhile, in the United States the hip and "woke" compete with one another on who belongs to the most oppressed victim group. Because victimhood brings status in the US today; the US is rapidly becoming ever-more dominated by a victimhood culture.

What we call victimhood culture combines some aspects of honor and dignity. People in a victimhood culture are like the honorable in having a high sensitivity to slight. They’re quite touchy, and always vigilant for offenses. Insults are serious business, and even unintentional slights might provoke a severe conflict. But, as in a dignity culture, people generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some authority figure or other third party. They complain to the law, to the human resources department at their corporation, to the administration at their university, or — possibly as a strategy of getting attention from one of the former — to the public at large.

The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There’s a corresponding tendency to emphasize one’s degree of victimization, one’s vulnerability to harm, and one’s need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression.

The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor.

When I posted the ACLJ report elsewhere, adding that "Americans would not know actual victimhood if it punched them in the face," a liberal friend of 20-plus years responded,

Suggest that to the family of the black man shot dead by police in a Walmart for holding a toy gun. Or the family of the black child shot dead by police in a Chicago park a few years ago for the same thing. The cop just rolled up, jumped out of the car and opened fire.

Then there are the thousands driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. The mentally ill walking the streets because we won't pay for treatment.

Or the veterans who can't receive decent care or who rely on food stamps that may be cut again so corporations can have tax cuts.

Or...

Don, I don't deny that Christians are being killed in other lands and that it is indeed genocide. But I think you are being pretty selective in defining victims. There are indeed many victims to be found in the US.

Of course there are true victims in America today. The murder rate in Chicago, Baltimore and some other Democrat-controlled cities is shocking. Those killed are certainly victims and often innocent victims.

But what we do not have is a real victim class, despite the devoted efforts of the Left to paint all black people, all homosexuals, all women, etc. as members of a specially-victimized class of persons, all of whom are dragged into victimhood just because of that identity.

No. Not even close to that. In the US today we do not have anything that even approaches the loosest definition of genocide as is happening to our brothers and sisters in Christ in much of the world. We do not have anything that approaches deliberate, planned, lethal persecution of a victim-class of people who are being killed, harmed, injured, deprived of rights or punished simply because of their religion.

And anyone who says, "Oh, America has lots of victims, too!" simply proves my point, that in America today, status-victimhood is a sought-after possession, and those who say that are incredibly equating, "I was triggered and offended by that joke about gays," with, "My husband and my children were beheaded because they were Christians."

I will backtrack, though, on one class of people who are definitely being killed genocidally in America purely because of their identity. That is the unborn, especially unborn black Americans.

But that is not merely acceptable to the Left, it is positively desirable. So perhaps you will understand when I find such protests against this post entirely unpersuasive and in fact unserious.

End note: American Christians are by no means under persecution (though sometimes discrimination), but that is not to say that the rhetorical groundwork is not being laid: Former Antifa College Professor: Kill Christians, Clock Trump With a Bat

Jeff Klinzman is a former adjunct Antifa College Professor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Former” because he turned in his resignation after his online comments garnered a considerable backlash. ...

Klinzman also acknowledged that he was Antifa, and made incendiary statements on his facebook page…such as wanting to “stop evangelical Christians” and then included a poem that said, “Kill them all and bury them deep in the ground.”
 
“It’s not pretty, and I’m not proud, but seeing what evangelical Christians are doing to this county and its people fills me with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.” 

He knows he need not worry, though. Another college will quickly hire him, and at a large increase in compensation.

Gendercide and the problem of millions of extra young men

Science Alert:

A deep-rooted preference for sons over daughters has skewed the world's sex ratios more than we thought.

A massive five-year analysis has found that since 1970, sex-selective abortions in a dozen countries have resulted in 23 million 'missing' girls.

These are women that were never born, and yet today, their absence is palpable, especially in eastern Europe and Asia. In China alone, the study found there were 11.9 million missing females, and India had 10.6 million.

Males are normally born at a rate of 105 males birth for every 100 female births. It evens out over the next 20 years or so because males die at a higher rate before maturity than females. But now females die in the womb at a much higher rate than males.

After years of a controversial single-child policy, China was unsurprisingly at the top. At one point in 2005, the authors found that the most populated country in the world actually had a male birth ratio of 118.

So what do you do with tens of millions of young, virile and frankly horny young men who have zero chance of getting married because there are zero women available to marry them? Maybe more importantly, what do those men do? The question practically answers itself.

Today, in China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million, and it's causing an epidemic of loneliness, a distortion of labour markets, and an increase in female trafficking and prostitution.

Not only that, but those nations will lose one of the natural restraints of going to war that inhibited prior generations, though of course not always successfully: the fear of massive casualties. China could invade Taiwan and if it lost three million men conquering the country, so what? It still has 30 or 40 million more that can die invading somewhere else.

More insight is provided by the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in, "Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences."

In parts of China and India, there will be a 12–15% excess of young men. These men will remain single and will be unable to have families, in societies where marriage is regarded as virtually universal and social status and acceptance depend, in large part, on being married and creating a new family (45).

An additional problem is that many of these men are rural peasants of low socioeconomic class and with limited education (46). When there is a shortage of women in the marriage market, the women can “marry up,” inevitably leaving the least desirable men with no marriage prospects (47). For example, in China 94% of all unmarried people age 28–49 are male and 97% of them have not completed high school (48). So, in many communities today there are growing numbers of young men in the lower echelons of society who are marginalized because of lack of family prospects and who have little outlet for sexual energy. A number of commentators predict that this situation will lead to increased levels of antisocial behavior and violence and will ultimately present a threat to the stability and security of society (31, 45–49).

There is some empirical evidence to fear such a scenario. Gender is a well-established individual-level correlate of crime, and especially violent crime (50). It is a consistent finding across cultures that an overwhelming percentage of violent crime is perpetrated by young, unmarried, low-status males (50–52). In India, a study carried out between 1980 and 1982 showed a strong correlation between homicide rates in individual states across the country and the sex ratio in those states, after controlling for potential confounders such as urbanization and poverty (53). The authors concluded that there was a clear link between sex ratio and violence as a whole, not just violence against women as might be assumed when there is a shortage of females. These analyses were repeated by Hudson and Den Boer (46), who showed that the relationship between sex ratio and murder rates at the level of the Indian state persisted through the late 1990s. In China, young male migrant workers are thought to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of urban crime, especially violent crime. It is reported that migrants account for 50% of all criminal cases in the major receiving cities for migrants, with some cities reporting up to 80% (54).

There is also evidence that, when single young men congregate, the potential for more organized aggression is likely to increase substantially (45, 53). Hudson and Den Boer, in their provocative writings on this subject (45, 46), go further, predicting that these men are likely to be attracted to military or military-type organizations, with the potential to be a trigger for large-scale domestic and international violence. With 40% of the world's population living in China and India, the authors argue that the sex imbalance could impact regional and global security, especially because the surrounding countries of Pakistan, Taiwan, Nepal, and Bangladesh also have high sex ratios.

It will get worse until 2050, when the number of "missing girls" will peak at present trend lines.

What about the United States? Wikipedia:

While the majority of parents in United States do not practice sex-selective abortion, there is certainly a trend toward male preference. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, if they were only allowed to have one child, 40% of respondents said they would prefer a boy, while only 28% preferred a girl.[107] When told about prenatal sex selection techniques such as sperm sorting and in vitro fertilization embryo selection, 40% of Americans surveyed thought that picking embryos by sex was an acceptable manifestation of reproductive rights.[108] These selecting techniques are available at about half of American fertility clinics, as of 2006.[109]

But I guess that's okay because abortion on demand is a woman's sacred right. Kidnapping young girls and women into sex-trafficking rings for unmarriageable men? That's a crime. That it occurs at increased numbers because of abortion does not matter because abortion? That's medical care.

Syria gas attack and "zero evidence"

And I thought the science was settled

Geosystems scientists at Oxford University, that well-known den of climate-change deniers, have concluded that "Global warming may be occurring more slowly than previously thought."

Not warming very fast after all.

Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found.

 

The Earth warmed more slowly than the models forecast, meaning the planet has a slightly better chance of meeting the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

 

Scientists said previous models may have been “on the hot side”.

 

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, does not play down the threat which climate change has to the environment, and maintains that major reductions in emissions must be attained.

 

But the findings indicate the danger may not be as acute as was previously thought.

 

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

Don't you hate it when nature won't cooperate in confirming your politics? By that I refer again to Ottmar Edenhofer, the lead author of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report and co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change.

He told Germany's Neue Zurcher Zeitung in November, as reported by Investors.com:
"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization." ...

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

What is climate science really about? Oh, you know:

Remember, climate science's only customers are governments because climate science has no product.

The Korean War never ended

Retired US Army Col. and syndicated columnist Austin Bay, with whom I have enjoyed many informative email exchanges (for me, not him) explains in illuminating detail why the never-ended Korean War has reached a new tipping point. The peninsula is perhaps the world's most dangerous flash point now.

Tillerson: North Korea Threat Is Imminent, Strategic Patience Is Over

Read the whole thing. Then pray.

Well, Trump is Hitler, after all

"Germans outraged as U.S. plays wrong version of their anthem"

REUTERS - German tennis has responded with outrage after the United States Tennis Association made the embarrassing error of playing the Nazi-era version of Germany's national anthem during a Federation Cup tie in Hawaii.

The version played included the first stanza, beginning "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles," which was used as Nazi propaganda. It was dropped after World War Two.

"I thought it was the epitome of ignorance, and I've never felt more disrespected in my whole life, let alone in Fed Cup," Germany's Andrea Petkovic was reported as saying, adding that she considered walking off court before the singles match against Alison Riske.

German team coach Barbara Ritter said the mistake was "an absolute scandal, a disrespectful incident and inexcusable".

The USTA tweeted its apologies, saying "The USTA extends a sincere apology to the German Fed Cup team & fans 4 the outdated National Anthem. This mistake will not occur again."

Since Donald Trump is Hitler, this was to be expected, Ja?

Can the president ban travel here by foreign nationals?

Can President Trump do this?

Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Heck yes.

I've covered this before, but under both the Constitution and federal law, there is no restriction on what foreign nationals the nation's president may prohibit entry into the United States. If the president wants to bar entry by left-handed redheads born on odd-number-dated Thursdays, s/he may do so with complete impunity.

Since the weekend, when President Trump banned entry into the United States from seven named nations (the same seven, btw, that President Obama also restricted), many commentators have claimed that religious discrimination in immigration is prohibited by the First Amendment to the Constitution, either the establishment clause or the free-practice clause, or both. They claim that Trump has ordered a "Muslim ban" since all seven of the countries are nationally Islamic.

Well, it's a pretty curious Muslim ban that leaves Indonesia unaffected, which has 202 million Muslims, the largest Muslim population in the world (IIRC, more than all Muslims in all Arab countries). Or India, for that matter, which has 172 million Muslims.

Here are the seven nations named:

1. Syria, pop. 22.85 million
2. Iran, 77.5 million
3. Iraq, 33.4 million
4. Libya, 6.2 million
5. Somalia, 10.5 million
6. Sudan, 38 million
7. Yemen, 24.4 million

Number of people affected by the temporary ban: 212.8 million, or not many more than the population of Indonesia alone. So if this order is a "Muslim ban," it's failing miserably.

Set aside for now the question of wisdom or the humanity of the order. The question in this post simply is whether it would pass legal and Constitutional muster.

In fact, it already meets both. And there are ample precedents in both law and court cases that say so.

Here is the key and central point: Foreign Nationals outside the US have no Constitutional protections

Constitutional protections apply to the persons who are US citizens or under the jurisdiction of the United States. Jurisdiction is physical space, geographically defined. It is the territories of the 50 states of the union plus territories of non-states such as Guam or Puerto Rico, governed by the US federal government. (There are complexities regarding the Constitutional protections of US citizens outside US jurisdiction, but that's not what Trump is talking about.)

Persons who are not US citizens and who are not physically present on US territory are called "foreigners." There are about seven billion of them. They have no Constitutional protections at all for the simple reason that they are under the sovereign authority of the entity wherever they may be located.

In the 1972 case, Kleindienst v. Mandel, The US Supreme Court ruled that Belgian national Ernest Mandel, who had applied for entry into the US, had no Constitutional right to enter. The ruling said in part,

It is clear that Mandel personally, as an unadmitted and nonresident alien, had no constitutional right of entry to this country as a nonimmigrant or otherwise.

That means that the US federal government may, for any reason it chooses, bar entry onto US territory by anyone it chooses, for any reason it chooses, whether one person or many.

But wait, there's more! The president enjoys that actual power right now without consulting with Congress in the slightest. Title 8, Section 1182 of the U.S. Code provides in relevant part:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

But wait, there's still more! In Kerry v. Din, 2015, the US Supreme Court,

... clearly separated the rights for people inside and outside the U.S.

“Due process applies to people who are in the United States, whether you are a citizen, not a citizen and you cross the border without inspection,” [immigration attorney] Bretz said. “It does not apply to people abroad."

USA Today has a pretty good and nonpartisan summary discussion of Trump's order. I would only pick the nit that in the article's "Is it legal?" section, it seems to disregard altogether that Trump's order has a duration of only three months. That's an essential aspect of the legal issue because, as the article points out, Congress, not the president, sets enduring policy on immigration. However, the president sets policy on visa issuance apart from immigration.

Foreign Policy on Obama's Legacy

Foreign Policy is pretty much the trade journal of the Establishment diplomatic corps and professors of the field. And when this is its consensus assessment, it really means it's much worse than they are letting on: Obama's hesitant approach to foreign policy resulted in the biggest stain on his legacy

The link is to a reprint at Business Insider, since access to FP is firewalled.

Then there is this, too:

What exactly is the legal authorization of the United States dropping bombs on Syria, Libya, Somalia or Yemen? Can anyone point to a Congressional authorization?

And remember that in 2011, Obama imperially declared war on Libya without a syllable of Congressional authorization. Congress did in response what Congress has proven it does best: rolled over and played dead. It certainly did not protect its own exclusive Constitutional authority or attempt to reclaim it later. That's not even including that the administration did not even have a rudimentary plan for what it said it wanted to do. Now Libya is a failed state.

As I said in 2014:

Missiles for Christmas!

Just what the world needs now:

Drudge Report today, right column:

Here is a clue to P.E. Trump: The world will never come to its senses. As Richard Fernandez put it, "The story of mankind is the tale of someone who wakes up in Paradise and decides to burn it down."

And on Sunday we will celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. God help us. Now more than ever.

Just what the world needs now:

What comes after ISIS?

ISIS is crumbling - though there are miles to go before we rest - and the question looming ever larger is simply, "What comes after ISIS?"

The Islamic State could eventually lose control of Raqqa, but it is expected to regroup in remote areas, such as Al Bukamal and Al Qaim, along the Syria-Iraq border. The movement may be disrupted, but U.S. officials concede that it will be almost impossible to totally dismantle it. An end to Syria’s wider six-year war—in any way that both stabilizes one of the most important geostrategic countries in the Middle East and favors U.S. interests—also seems increasingly remote.

And the quest for a caliphate goes on. “Al Qaeda might lay claim to it for a moment, and the Islamic State may lay claim to it, but there’s always been this dream of recapturing and bringing back the caliphate,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told me. “Who’s going to tap into that next?”

Peace is definitely not on the horizon.

OPEC is dead, awaiting burial

Many analysts say that the Nov. 30 deal by OPEC nations to cut daily oil production by 1.2 million barrels per day will turn out not to be very consequential in 2017. Non-OPEC Russia, a major producer, also agreed to cut production by 300,000 bpd and another 300,000 pledge is being sought from other non-OPEC countries, making the total potential cut 1.8M bpd. The additional pledges will be gained (or not) on  Dec. 10.

What was the deal? Financial Times explains:

Let's start with Bloomberg's coverage of former Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi:

"The only tool they have is to constrain production," al-Naimi said of OPEC at an event in Washington, D.C. "The unfortunate part is we tend to cheat." ...

He also expressed skepticism that Russia, considered a wildcard during talks, would follow through on its promise to reduce output. "Will Russia cut 300,000?" he said. "I don’t know. In the past, they didn’t."

CNBC's Jackie DeAngelis said that "Nobody really knows at this point" whether there will be cheating.

The moves in oil prices won't really take off until we learn whether members are cheating on the deal or not, DeAngelis said. That won't be until February or March, given that the deal doesn't take effect until January.

If everyone holds to their part of the deal, then crude oil prices could break past the $60-mark, according to Goldman Sachs.

But many producers both inside and outside the cartel have already been cheating. In fact, Bloomberg calls the announced cuts "fake news" for which consumers pay real money.

... Russia as a country made $6 billion just by talking to OPEC about cutting its oil output: News about the negotiations drove up the price. Now, Russia has agreed to a cut by 300,000 barrels per day by January "if technically possible." It looks like a lot -- a quarter of the total cut OPEC members have agreed among themselves -- but then Russia's output increased by 520,000 barrels a day between the end of August and the end of October, reaching an absolute record level. Russia has been making money on the increasing price while growing production -- the best of both worlds thanks to some deft news manipulation and nothing else. Now, even if Russia cuts output by about 2.7 percent of the current level, as it has promised, it will still reap a profit if the price of crude holds at the current level -- about 7 percent higher on Thursday morning than three days before.

Many years ago I visited a Toyota lot to look at used cars. There was one I looked at with sticker price of $2,999. It was attractive but too old so I moved on. Days later I returned and found balloons and banners all over the lot announcing a big sale. What did the windshield placard of that car say? "40% Off! Was $4,499, now only $2,999!"

That's what OPEC and other producers have done with production: they ran production up preparing for a deal to run it part-way down. Qatar, for example, is on track to surpass 1M bpd for the first time ever. And even if all OPEC nations fully comply with the cuts (which they never have done before), by this time next year developed nations' on-hand stocks of oil will have declined all the way from 65 days's supply to 56. That's enough for speculators and traders to make major coin between now and then, but not near enough to matter to the actual use of oil in consuming nations.

The thing about the OPEC deal, though, is that we've been here before:

This the price pattern comparison not of the direct price of crude but of an oil ETF called USO (US Oil Fund). USO tracks daily the price moves of crude at a 1:1 ratio. If oil prices rise by 2 percent, so does USO's price, and the same for falling prices. (See my Sept. 9 post, in which I explained why oil prices would rise, which they did. And then fell again, as the top chart above shows.)

Finally, the OPEC deal to set higher prices will be torpedoed by non-OPEC producers, including Russia despite its OPEC head nod, who have little incentive to cut production, and by United States shale-oil producers.

The U.S., Canada, Brazil and Kazakhstan aren't going to cut back on production, and neither is Indonesia, which left OPEC over that very matter, less than a year after rejoining it.

Financial Times chimes in,

But there is a surge of production coming in the next 12 months from new fields in countries outside Opec, such as Brazil, Canada and Kazakhstan. It is perfectly possible that total global production — from Opec and non-Opec states combined — will be higher next year than in 2016.

By far the major influence here is shale. In fact, that there was an OPEC deal struck at all on Nov. 30 is a sign of shale's growing market power and OPEC's diminishment.

OPEC isn't cutting production because it is interested or able to manage the oil market as it has in the past, it has done so because it has failed to crush the U.S. shale industry in a way that would have made it hobble along for a significant period of time, while waiting for global demand for oil to pick up.

Shale is winning

What OPEC's oil ministers doubtless realize is that shale-oil production has matured greatly in technology and economics and still has more maturing to do. Shale oil has been growing steadily less expensive to get out of the ground. Shale production has proved to be very resilient against oil-price declines despite major financial obstacles that traditional pump wells do not have: shale production rates fall per well about 70% after the first year, for example, and about half the total well costs are spent in just operating the well while traditional pump wells are very inexpensive to operate.

Nonetheless, as oil prices cratered early this year to sub-$30, shale production actually increased.

Why has U.S. shale production proven to be so resilient to low oil prices? I can think of (at least) three reasons. All three come down to costs.

First, as oil prices fell, so did the costs of drilling and completion services—more than 30% from the last quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2016. Because of this steep drop in costs, wells that would have been only marginally profitable in late 2014 could still be profitable in early 2016. Much of this decline in the price of drilling and completion services can be rationalized simply by supply and demand.  When oil prices fell, shale producers had the ability to drive a harder bargain with their suppliers.  After all, there was less of a “pie” to share in those negotiations, and there were fewer customers for oilfield service contractors to negotiate with.  Thus, even without changing operating procedures or drilling locations, shale producers were partially insured against lower oil prices by a fall in the costs they faced.

Second, the engineering properties of shale wells mean that “breakeven” price calculations can be misleading about the profitability of new wells in a different oil price environment. While the development costs of conventional oil wells are mostly fixed in the form of drilling an expensive hole in the right place, more than half of the cost of developing a shale well lies in the complicated hydraulic fracturing treatment that producers must employ to make these wells productive.  There is now long-standing evidence that more aggressive treatments generate more oil production. ...

Finally, shale producers are learning how to get greater bang for their buck out of drilling operations. As my colleague Sam Ori pointed out in an earlier post, producers have substantially increased the of total oil recovered in a typical well—from about 5% of the original oil in place to more than 12%. BP’s Chief Economist Spencer Dale predicts a 25% recovery factor might even be conservative five years from now. 

Here is the key point why shale is going to dominate the world oil market more and more:

As today’s shale producers continue to learn the most efficient ways of developing new wells, tomorrow’s producers in shale basins around the world will probably follow their lead.  In doing so, the emergence of a nimble and innovating global shale industry will continue to frustrate conventional oil producers eager to return to tightly controlled production and higher prices.

And so,

The reason the production cut this time around isn't going to be effective over the long term, is it has never been implemented with a mature U.S. shale industry. OPEC has never had a third competitor (beyond Russia), which is able to step into the vacuum created by a cut and quickly recover at least a portion of it.

The OPEC empire can't strike back
As mentioned earlier, this is being considered as a major aggressive move by many following the oil market, with the idea it's no different than it has been in the past. Not only is this not the case, but when shale oil production surges over the next couple of years, there is little or nothing left in OPEC's arsenal to deal with it.

What OPEC won't do is keep production cuts in place and let shale producers gain world-market share at their expense, especially since the production cuts will not actually affect worldwide supply.

FT:

Cartels need a swing producer that has the capacity to vary production to the degree necessary to control the market and which can absorb the pain of such a move. That is what they would have done in the past, but it may now be impossible, economically and politically. Saudi Arabia cannot sustain such a sacrifice, particularly given its weak security situation and its failure to diversify its economy. If that is true, the $50 price we have today is a ceiling. Opec as a cartel is over and everyone will have to get used to the new reality.

Saudi Arabia used to be the swing producer, but those days are gone. It simply cannot afford the deep further cuts necessary to raise oil prices above $60, especially since one of the key components of a cartel is dominance of the means of production. But as we've seen, those days are gone for good and so is the cartel.

OPEC, as we have all come to know and hate it, may not be quite dead yet but it's coughing up blood. From this point on governments of nationally-controlled, oil-based economies will not control the oil market. Instead corporate oil producers, sensitive to market-based supply and demand and especially to market competition, will move to the fore. It's hard to see how that can be anything but better for consumers.

Maybe 1960-2016 is more accurate.

The coming World War Hillary?

First, Green Party candidate Jill Stein said that a President Hillary Clinton will likely start a war with Russia that will go nuclear.

Now The Independent chimes in: "Could Hillary Clinton start a World War? Sure as [snip] she could – and here’s how."

Basically, the paper says that Hillary Clinton is fundamentally aggressive while Trump is not. This is not an endorsement of Trump at all; in fact the essay points out the real problems with Trump's potential in facing Russia, mainly,

You can condemn that semi-isolationist “America First” mind-set if you want, but the easiest way to prevent the next world war is simply to let the Russians have what they want, provided it makes no difference to you. Trump has almost said as much about American intentions; smaller Nato allies, if they don’t pay their way, can go hang if they want American men and women to lay down their lives for them. The Russians can have Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania if they want. We’re not taking about giving them Rhode Island, or Alaska, are we?

Well, I have written for at least eight years now that NATO was finished a long time ago:

What has NATO done for us?

No Action, Talk Only

What has NATO done for us redux

The pointlessness of NATO

NATO: Broke, Leaderless and Pointless

NATO continues to pretend it matters

And finally, George Friedman making the same points.

Yogi Berra on $400 Million Iran ransom

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. [Link]

The administration insists that the $400 Million payout has no relationship to the hostages Iran just happened to release at the same time. No relationship at all, none, nada, zip, null set.

Well, of course. But remember what Yogi Berra once observed: "It's too coincidental to be a coincidence."

And it's also such a coincidence that Berra's line applies over and over to this administration and its doings.

Update: "This is not the first time Obama has paid a ransom to the mullahs."

The evil empire of Saudi Arabia

The evil empire of Saudi Arabia is the West’s real enemy

Some Brits do get it, in this case a British Muslim. Take for example what has happened to Mecca:

The Clock Tower and the Grand Mosque in the Saudi holy city of Mecca, September 25, 2015 MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH/AFP/Getty Images

For all the thousands of people Osama bin Laden caused to die on 9/11/2001, he reserved his principal hatred for the corrupted House of Saud. As I wrote in my 2003 essay, "Osama bin Laden’s strategic plan: well, folks, he ain't got one:"

Bin Laden has been emphatic that the Saudi regime is un-Islamic, corrupt and oppressive of the Saudi people, although, of course, he blames the United States for all this. His most serious charge against the Sauds is that they permitted the occupation of "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" (meaning Saudi Arabia itself, wherein lie Mecca and Medina) by the Americans, who are conspirators with Zionists to destroy Islam.  In his 1996 fatwa, bin Laden said of the House of Saud: 

The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (Allah's blessing and salutations on him) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places - the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims - by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. . . .  From here, today we begin the work, talking and discussing the ways of correcting what had happened to the Islamic world in general, and the Land of the two Holy Places in particular. . .  But the competition between influential [Saudi] princes for personal gains and interest had destroyed the country. Through its course of actions the regime has torn off its legitimacy:  (1) Suspension of the Islamic Shari'ah law and exchanging it with man made civil law. . . .  (2) The inability of the regime to protect the country, and allowing the enemy of the Ummah - the American crusader forces- to occupy the land for the longest of years. . . .

 There followed a long list of grievances against the Saudi regime, particularly emphasizing its un-Islamic rule, the wealth-corruption of its princes and accusing it of being a puppet of the USA. 

But back to our British Muslim commentator and the evil of the House of Saud:

The state systematically transmits its sick form of Islam across the globe, instigates and funds hatreds, while crushing human freedoms and aspiration. But the West genuflects to its rulers. Last week Saudi Arabia was appointed chair of the UN Human Rights Council, a choice welcomed by Washington. Mark Toner, a spokesperson for the State Department, said: “We talk about human rights concerns with them. As to this leadership role, we hope that it is an occasion for them to look into human rights around the world and also within their own borders.”

The jaw simply drops. Saudi Arabia executes one person every two days. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr is soon to be beheaded then crucified for taking part in pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring. He was a teenager then. Raif Badawi, a blogger who dared to call for democracy, was sentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes. Last week, 769 faithful Muslim believers were killed in Mecca where they had gone on the Hajj. Initially, the rulers said it was “God’s will” and then they blamed the dead. 

Mecca was once a place of simplicity and spirituality. Today the avaricious Saudis have bulldozed historical sites and turned it into the Las Vegas of Islam – with hotels, skyscrapers and malls to spend, spend, spend. The poor can no longer afford to go there. Numbers should be controlled to ensure safety – but that would be ruinous for profits. 

There is a lot more, so read the whole thing.

As I first wrote in 2002, "In fact, Saudi Arabia is much more a family-run business than a true nation-state (and it's a Corleone-like family at that)."

Related: Cheap oil isn't Saudi Arabia's only big risk

Europe's coming civil war

Michael Yon​ and I had a short but to the point discussion about this on FB back when the mass migration of Syrians and others started overland, by now a few months ago. We concluded that there was a real chance of civil war if the Euro governments didn't start listening to the European people,

And now this:

Society in western Europe is on the verge of breaking down amid chaotic violence caused by economic dislocation, mass immigration and terrorism. This is not the view of some ‘crazy survivalist’ but of the head of the Swiss Armed Forces.

Lieutenant-General André Blattmann has issued a warning to the Swiss people that society is dangerously close to collapse and advised those not already armed as part of the Swiss Army reserve to take steps to arm themselves. Blattmann has been head of the Armed Forces since, 1 March 2009 and his words carry very significant weight in a country in which several Citizens’ Initiative referenda against burqas and mosques have proven enormously popular as concerns grow about immigration and Islamisation.

I spent a day with a Swiss general back in the 1980s (not this one, obviously) who was the Swiss military attache to the embassy in Washington. I can affirm that Swiss senior officers are not given to over excitement or hyperbole. This is very, very sobering.

If you are not reading the European media online, be assured that you will not be kept informed by the American media on what is really the looking chaos there. It is getting grimmer by the day.

More: "Overwhelmed by 'Migrants,' Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces 'General, Permanent Terror Threat' "

Update: Apparently the Swiss people are listening to Gen. Blattmann: "Gun sales up in 12 Swiss cantons"

Israel and the 1948 "borders"

Post by The Jewish Standard.

Methodist church endorses bombing ISIS?

The United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries seems to have endorsed bombing ISIS to protect persecuted Christians and others under ISIS' literal gun:

We join our voices to those of leaders of the World Council of Churches in asking U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to “marshal all available resources to protect the people of Iraq in this hour.” We agree with the WCC assertions that when nations are unable to protect their citizens that “responsibility is taken up by international bodies and their member states.” (italics added)

Pope Francis already called for military attacks against ISIS, as was made clear by one of the chief Vatican spokesmen.

White House: World is tranquil. Defense Secretary: 'The World is Exploding All Over'

Just a month ago: 'WH Spokesman: Administration's Foreign Policy Has Improved 'Tranquility Of The Global Community':



Today:

Fresh off a trip to India and Australia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed a group of Marines in San Diego, California Tuesday, and may have delivered a line that will show up in Republican campaign ads this election cycle. After updating the troops on some issues in the Pacific region and the Middle East, Hagel took questions from some of the Marines and gave a stark assessment of the global security situation: "The world is exploding all over." 

Chuck Hagel has never exactly had a reputation as a strategist of any sort, but at least he seems to be able to look at facts and assess them for what they are, unlike his boss.

And yet the irony is lost on them

The WaPo picked up the dripping irony up front:

MUNICH — In an unusual joint appearance overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told European allies Saturday that Washington would depend more heavily on them to tackle a litany of political and security crises, even as the two pushed back against concerns that the Obama administration was abdicating leadership on the same issues.

That's not "leading from the rear," it's running to the rear! So it's time for a caption contest!

"I don't know, John, I think that hitting five beer cellars tonight might be a
little too ambitious. But you're paying, right?"