Monday, March 16, 2009
Israel's Image in China
Comment: It's Time for a National Oil Company
Dateline USA....
With oil prices plummeting, now is the time for a U.S. national oil company to tap reserves that are too costly for Big OIl and large independents that answer to stockholders instead of the national interest.
A government-owned national oil company could develop heavy oil, produce new oil from old fields using enhanced oil recovery methods, drill offshore, and perhaps, even, squeeze oil from shale rocks or liquefy coal. Developing natural gas--the nation has huge, untapped reserves--and building pipelines so people can use the valuable resource--would also be worthwhile.
So would building one or two new oil refineries. Venezuela's lunatic leader won't be in power forever; one day, soon, maybe, it should be possible to revive the old idea of a Western Hemisphere energy alliance, embracing Canada and Latin America. Such a union, which this reporter and other observers proposed in the late 1970s, could hasten the breakup of OPEC. Venezuea, alone, sits atop a century or more of heavy crude oil. The Ornico River belt oozes with the gooey, gummy resource--proof that the world is actually running into oil, only it is the wrong kind of oil. The history of every natural resource is that of a transition from the relatively inexpensive but scarce grade to the far more abundant but also far more costly and complex kind. But that's another story....
A national oil company would create tens of thousands of new jobs and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
A national oil company could and should have been launched decades ago. Will it happen now? Probably--in fact, almost certainly--not. The Obama administration is a captive of environmental extremists, led by the charlatan Al Gore, who have persuaded the President to classify carbon as pollution--because of supposedly manmade global warming--and treat all oil and gas ... and coal ... regardless of the source ... as inherently evil resources.
The administration's policies, including a plan for carbon trading, will make energy--electricity and natural gas--more expensive during a recession that still threatens to turn into a depression. Ordinary people will suffer; the middle class will be pauperized, and the poor will be pulverized.
It's the so-called green way, also known as the Goring of America.
EDITOR'S NOTE: We don't rely on the private sector for national security. Why depend on Big OIl for energy security? We have not killed the U.S. Postal Service to accommodate Fedex. Why give Big Oil a monopoly on energy?UN Expert Condemns North Korean 'Death Traps'
A U.N. human rights investigator accused North Korean authorities Monday of committing widespread torture in prisons that he called "death traps."
Life in the reclusive communist-ruled country is "dire and desperate," said Vitit Muntarbhorn, adding that people are denied enough food to survive.Self-Hating Jew Defends Iran on Times Op-Ed Page
Dateline USA....
Roger Cohen, a British-born, self-loathing Jewish columnist for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune--best known as one of America's leading intellectual advocates of appeasing nuclear-arming Iran--has penned a particularly odious defense of his indefensible position.
"What’s required is American pragmatism ... that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb," he argues in an article on the Times' Op-Ed Page.
In other words, the mullahs have won. The only hope of possibly persuading them not to develop nuclear weapons, according to Cohen, is to offer them security assurances. Never mind their long-range missiles--capable of "burning Tel Aviv," in the words of Iranian maniac-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--or their chemical and biological weapons ... or state sponsor ship of mass-murdering Hezbollah and other Foreign Terrorist Organizations (U.S. State Department designation) ... or torture, brutality, and repression. The clerical fascist regime must be ... preserved ... according to Cohen.
"This is the Middle East's least undemocratic state outside of Israel," he says, echoing sentiments expressed in a series of articles he wrote last month for the Times about a trip he conducted to Iran in which he asserted that Iranian Jews were well treated.
Click here to read the entire essay. It is sickening but important.
Also on Monday, ironically, the Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-Genera Gabi Ashkenazi, on an official visit to the United States, told his American colleagues that the Iranian threat could still be handled via sanctions. However, he stressed that an Israeli military strike was a "serious" option.
He added that as head of the IDF, he has been asked to come up with various contingencies and that a military operation was a concrete possibility.
Ashkenazi, who was born in an Israeli farming cooperative, Moshav Hagor, in 1954 to a Holocaust survivor father from Bulgaria and a Syrian-born mother, was a member of the legendary, Entebbe rescue operation commando team.
The contrast between the two men--Cohen, a self-hating, assimilationist appeaser, and Ashkenazi, a courageous and proud, soldier-farmer--could not be greater.
Tel-Hai!
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
It is extremely positive, in spite of China's relations with Iran. Click here for the report.
Eliane Engler reports from Geneva:
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