Monthly Archives: September 2019

Changing And Omitting Numbers To Get The Results You Want

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The American Thinker posted an article today about how some of the conclusions on the Canadian global warming model were reached. Anyone who has ever taken at least one science class would be horrified.

The article reports:

Environment Canada, led by Justin Trudeau-appointed Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, is all-in on the hypothesis that manmade global warming is an existential threat to humanity. It is so important to hand control of energy use to the government that mere actual, historical data that might raise doubt about the extent of purported warming over time must be thrown out and replaced by “models” of what the “scientists” think the historical temperature record must have been.

In other words, the computer models Canada uses to measure and project “global warming” are themselves based on other computer models.  The expression “Garbage in / garbage out” refers to the vulnerability of all computer models to poor quality data used as the basis of their calculations.  The raises the awkward question of the quality of the models used in place of actual historical data. And it raises the question of why this scrapping of actual data and substituting of guesses (aka, models) was not made clear from the outset.

If the numbers don’t add up to the conclusion you want, make up your own numbers.

The article continues:

Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter notes that in many cases the data that were scrapped indicated higher temperatures in the past:

For example, Vancouver had a higher record temperature in 1910 (30.6C) than in 2017 (29.5C).

Toronto had a warmer summer in 1852 (32.2C) than in 2017 (31.7C).

The highest temperature in Moncton in 2017 was four degrees cooler than in 1906.

Brandon, Man., had 49 days where the average daily temperature was above 20C in 1936, compared to only 16 in 2017, with a high temperature of 43.3C that year compared to 34.3C in 2017.

So what is this about?

An Investor’s Business Daily article posted on February 10, 2015 states the following:

Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.

Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

The climate is an excuse, the goal is world-wide government where the average person will be subject to the whims of the elite.

Common Sense Is Not Always Appreciated

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Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about some recent comments by Dr. Ben Carson.

The article shows us how a smear campaign works. The article reports:

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson issued an agency-wide email Friday attacking a “blatant mischaracterization” of his comments about transgenderism during his visit to California this week, which reportedly offended bureaucrats in San Francisco.

The Washington Post broke the story on Thursday, citing “three people present” at a HUD meeting:

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson expressed concern about “big, hairy men” trying to infiltrate women’s homeless shelters during an internal meeting, according to three people present who interpreted the remarks as an attack on transgender women.

While visiting HUD’s San Francisco office this week, Carson also lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women, two of the agency staffers said.

Carson’s remarks visibly shocked and upset many of the roughly 50 HUD staffers who attended Tuesday’s meeting, and prompted at least one woman to walk out in protest, the staffers said.

A HUD official, who had not been present at the meeting, defended Carson, saying he never used derogatory language against transgendered people. The official added that “Carson was referring to men who pretend to be women to gain access to battered women’s shelters — and not singling out transgender women as “big, hairy men.”

The article concludes:

In May, Carson announced a new HUD rule that would allow local homeless shelters to decide for themselves if they wanted to use biological sex, not gender identity, as a basis for deciding how to provide housing. The policy under the Obama administration had been a one-size-fits-all rule forcing all shelters to recognize gender identity.

Carson has decided that the safety of homeless women must come before transgender concerns about identity — and before the political sentiments of agency bureaucrats based in a state that has failed to tackle growing homelessness.

The issue here is the safety of women seeking shelter from abuse. What is to stop an abuser from saying he is transsexual to gain access to a shelter and then terrorizing the women in it? Who wants to be responsible for the first death in a women’s shelter caused by a man who gained access by claiming to be a transsexual when he was not?

The policy here is common sense. It is in place to protect women. Are we willing to sacrifice the safety of abused women in order to placate the transgender movement?

Twisted, Twisted, Twisted

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The political left has been trying to impeach President Trump since the day he was elected. Those efforts have been futile, although extremely expensive to the American taxpayer. The latest effort describes a so-called ‘whistleblower’ reporting on what he considered an alarming conversation between the President and a world leaders. The mainstream media has strategically leaked that the world leader was from Ukraine and President Trump asked for a corruption investigation into the antics of Hunter Biden (Joe Biden’s son, not known for his upstanding lifestyle). These efforts are beginning to look like those used by Wile E. Coyote to catch the roadrunner.

The Atlantic posted an article today with the headline, “If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is.” Wow. They’re got him dead to rights now. Except for a few things left out of the story.

The Atlantic reports:

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

The Conservative Treehouse reported today:

In what appears to be an effort to extract Ukraine from the toxic environment of American media fake political news, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko discusses the phone call between President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Minister Vadym Prystaiko was a participant in the discussions between the U.S. and Ukraine and has specific knowledge of the phone call. Minister Prystaiko says the phone call was long, friendly and covered a variety of important issues. There was no undue pressure or “coercion” from U.S. President Donald Trump.

The article includes a video:

 

It gets even more interesting. The Conservative Treehouse also reported:

The government of Ukraine under both Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and now President Volodymyr Zelensky, had been trying to deliver information about Obama officials and Democrat party officials (DNC on behalf of Hillary Clinton) requesting the government of Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 election.

Both Poroshenko and Zelensky administrations had tried, unsuccessfully, to get information to current U.S. officials. U.S. State Department officials in Ukraine were refusing to give visa’s to Ukrainian emissaries because they did not want the damaging information sent to the President Trump administration.

Failing to get help from the U.S. State Department, the Ukranians tried a workaround, and hired a respected U.S. lawyer to hand deliver the documentary evidence directly to the U.S. Department of Justice. The contracted American lawyer hand-delivered the information to the U.S. Department of Justice in New York.

However, after delivering the information and not hearing back from the U.S. government, the Ukrainian government, now led by President Zelensky, interpreted the silence as the Trump administration and U.S. government (writ large) being upset about the Ukraine involvement overall. Out of concern for a serious diplomatic breakdown, the Zelensky administration made a personal request to the U.S. State Department for assistance.

About those impeachable offenses… The Acme Explosives Kit just blew up in Wile E. Coyote’s face.

Is This A Winning Issue?

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Andrew Yang is running for President in the Democrat primary. He is currently polling at about 3 percent. He has some interesting ideas on changing the American culture.

Hot Air posted an article today about some of those ideas.

The article reports:

MSNBC held their latest “climate crisis” event for 2020 Democratic hopefuls yesterday and when Andrew Yang took the stage he brought up one possibility that all the candidates should weigh in on. When asked by the host what the world would look like in 2050 after the everyone began dealing with climate change and carbon emissions, he suggested that the end of private car ownership was probably on the horizon.

…Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC’s climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.

He told MSNBC host Ali Velshi that “we might not own our own cars” by 2050 to wean the United States economy off of fossil fuels, describing private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.” Privately owned cars would be replaced by a “constant roving fleet of electric cars.”

Somehow I don’t see this happening.

The article concludes:

There are two sides to this proposal, consisting of the practical and the political. Being as we are in the midst of a presidential race, the political may be more important in the short term. The fact is that the Democrats seem to keep coming up with ideas that may look good on paper at liberal cocktail parties but are not at all popular with the voters at large. Eliminating private car ownership is just such a proposal.

People love their cars. Nearly everyone realizes that they are expensive luxuries and account for too much pollution, but we still live in a car culture. It’s a status symbol and a totem of our freedom of movement. No matter how well-intentioned you may be, if you come along and say the government needs to take away all your cars, the public is going to be up on their hind legs. This is the way you lose elections.

On the practical side, I will grudgingly admit that Yang is probably at least partially correct about this. If he was saying there would be nothing but mass transit, that would be nuts. Mass transit simply isn’t practical for most of the country unless you live in a densely populated urban area. But he’s also picturing fleets of electric, driverless vehicles that anyone can summon when they need to go somewhere. Uber and Lyft are working on just such a plan right now and sooner or later it may become our new reality.

But having said that, electric vehicles still need to be powered. Until you answer the question of where you’re going to come up with all of the electricity needed to replace the power currently being generated by gasoline, you’re not going to be doing much for the climate. As I mentioned yesterday when talking about efforts in California to eliminate natural gas usage, the state derives roughly half of their electricity from natural gas plants. If all of the cars are suddenly running on electricity, they’re going to be burning a massively larger amount of natural gas to meet the demand.

Yet again, we’re seeing the Church of Climate Change forcing Democrats to toss out expensive, impractical ideas that most people will rebel against. And they can’t seem to help themselves.

There is a lot more to the relationship between Americans and their cars than transportation. Somehow I can’t see taking away our private cars as a winning idea. We also need to consider that American carbon emissions are only a part of the world’s carbon emissions. We are a small percentage of carbon pollution. Unless the countries that are not concerned about the environment cut their emissions, nothing we do will have much of an impact. Keep in mind that China and India, the world;s biggest polluters, we essentially exempt from the climate treaty for a number of years. Maybe the treaty wasn’t really about climate.

They Did Get Some Of It Right

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Yesterday The National Review posted an article about the decision by Colt to halt production of AR-15 rifles.

The article reports:

This, from ABC, is a nice example of a news organization deliberately bending the truth in order to advance a narrative that it wishes were true but is not:

Venerable gun manufacturer Colt says it will stop producing the AR-15, among other rifles, for the consumer market in the wake of many recent mass shootings in which suspects used the weapon.

Wow. Sounds dramatic. ABC continues:

“At the end of the day, we believe it is good sense to follow consumer demand and to adjust as market dynamics change,” Dennis Veilleux, president and CEO of Colt, said in a statement. “Colt has been a stout supporter of the Second Amendment for over 180 years, remains so, and will continue to provide its customers with the finest quality firearms in the world.”

So the story is that, although it still respects the Second Amendment, Colt is going to stop producing AR-15s after a series of mass shootings in which they were used. Right?

Wrong. That’s actually not the story at all, as ABC notes further down:

The company did not mention mass shootings in its statement about stopping production and instead blamed the indefinite pause in making the weapon on a “significant excess manufacturing capacity.”

And that is how you take truth and twist it until it leaves a totally false impression. That is the way the current mainstream media operates.

This Latest Attempt To Smear The President May Not End Well For Those Promoting It

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The Gateway Pundit posted an article yesterday about the latest scandal the media has concocted to damage President Trump. The scandal is related to something a whistle-blower heard President Trump discuss with a foreign leader. Of course all of the details are being leaked out strategically by the media in a fashion to hurt the President, but there are a few details we already know that are more damaging to the media.

The article reports:

After leaving office in 2017, Vice President Joe Biden Bragged about strong-arming the government of Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor.

Joe Biden made the remarks during a meeting of foreign policy specialists. Biden said he, “Threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.” Biden suggested during his talk that Barack Obama was in on the threat.

In April John Solomon revealed what Biden did not tell his audience. Joe Biden had Poroshenko fired because he was investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

 Poroshenko was investigating $3 million in funds that were being transferred out of Ukraine and into accounts in the United States at that time.
Joe Biden had him fired.

In May President Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in an interview that he plans to travel to Ukraine to push the country’s leadership on several probes that may prove “very, very helpful” to President Trump, as Republicans continue looking to turn the tables on Democrats and prove that they — not the GOP — were the party that improperly conspired with foreign actors.

This is a very awkward situation. It is appropriate for President Trump to tell Ukraine to clean up their corruption. The difficulty occurs when that corruption involves the son of someone currently leading in the Democrat presidential primary elections. At that point the appearance of a political motive becomes a problem. However, political motive or not, Joe Biden’s statement creates a problem for the Democrats. If Joe Biden’s son was involved in illegal international transactions during the time that Joe Biden was Vice-President, does that end the candidacy of Joe Biden for President? It’s the Democrat party, so it might not.

However, it is time that we dealt with politicians or their families getting rich because of their offices.

In August 2019, The Washington Examiner reported:

John Kerry’s stepson rushed to play damage control at the State Department after his business partner Hunter Biden cut a deal with an oligarch-owned Ukrainian gas company in 2014, according to internal State Department correspondence obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The correspondence adds to the questions about Biden’s business activities, which have dogged the 2020 Democratic primary campaign of his father Joe. Hunter Biden’s long history of drug and alcohol abuse, which contributed to his divorce and his dismissal from the Navy Reserve, has also attracted unwelcome publicity for the Democratic front-runner.

An email released to the Washington Examiner shows that Biden’s decision to join the board of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings sparked immediate concern within his inner circle about the political optics. Biden’s father Joe — now vying for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination — was then vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of 2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid Biden and Archer’s companies over $3 million.

Joe Biden is not responsible for his son’s misdeeds, but he is responsible for blocking an investigation into those misdeeds.

This scandal may turn out to be one the Democrats wish they hadn’t mentioned.

This Shouldn’t Be A Surprise To Anyone

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On September 6, I posted an article about Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, an airline mechanic in Florida who attempted to sabotage an airplane before it took off. Thank goodness his actions were discovered before the plane took off and the problem he created was corrected. He claimed that his actions were the result of a union wage dispute and that he was looking for overtime pay. The article I wrote states that I suspected there was probably more to the story. Well, there is.

The Tampa Bay Times posted an Associated Press story today that reported the following:

An American Airlines mechanic accused of sabotaging a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard at Miami International Airport was denied bond by a federal judge Wednesday after prosecutors suggested he may have links to a Middle East terrorist organization.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, a 60-year-old veteran employee, told investigators after his arrest earlier this month that he disabled the system because he was upset over stalled union contract negotiations with the airline and wanted to generate some overtime for maintenance on the plane. He said he meant no harm to anyone, and the July 17 flight was aborted before takeoff after an error alert appeared on the navigation system.

But federal prosecutors revealed new information about possible motives that prompted Magistrate Judge Chris McAliley to keep Alani behind bars, ruling that he posed a danger to the community and a flight risk.

“I have evidence before me that suggests you could be sympathetic to terrorists,” McAliley said, calling his alleged tampering with the aircraft “highly reckless and unconscionable.”

His arraignment on a sabotage-related charge is scheduled for Friday; if convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

At his detention hearing, prosecutors said that since his arrest investigators with the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force have learned that Alani lied about taking a trip to Iraq in March to visit his brother, and that he told a fellow American Airlines employee in June that his brother had been kidnapped and was a member of the Islamic State extremist group.

I am grateful for the federal investigators that uncovered the truth. I also wonder how Mr. Alani didn’t think that an error message would show up before takeoff. Possibly he thought the error message would not be noticed or would be ignored. Either way, I don’t have a lot of confidence in Mr. Alani as a mechanic.

This Is Totally Over The Top

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PJ Media posted an article yesterday about a person who chooses to be outraged at another person enjoying a fast-food meal. Yes, you read that right.

The article reports:

A Canadian publication, The Star, has printed an unintentionally hilarious editorial by a very disgruntled LGBTQWTF writer, Andrew Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler is very upset. His outrage and dismay have been caused by your love of delicious chicken from Chick-fil-A. How dare you??? In an essay entitled “Chick-fil-A is ideologically opposed to my existence,” Wheeler rails against the insensitivity of people who love chicken and waffle fries because it hurts his feelings, or something.

Mr. Wheeler, Chick-fil-A is not opposed to your existence in any way. The owner of Chick-fil-A believes in a more traditional lifestyle than you do. He wishes you no harm, and he does not oppose your existence.

The article includes the following quote from Mr. Wheeler:

This past weekend I saw something that made me unexpectedly queasy; a young woman slurping soda out of a fast food cup.It upset me because it was a Chick-fil-A cup.

Chick-fil-A is an anti-LGBTQ2 organization, not just because the founder publicly opposed same-sex marriage (he believed in a “biblical definition of marriage,” which doesn’t exist), but because company profits are donated to charities that oppress and marginalize queer people, especially queer youth.

Chick-fil-A is not an anti-LGBTQ2 organization–it is a fast-food chain. The company has the right to donate to any charity or cause it chooses, just as you have that right. No one is oppressing and marginalizing queer people. People who support the Biblical view of sexuality have as much right to speak and participate in the political arena as anyone else.

The article concludes:

When it comes down to it, there are lots of people who have lots of beliefs that are foreign to us. They’re allowed to have them. And it’s none of my business what those beliefs are. I wish a bunch of people didn’t exist, like communists and those people at the mall who try to put a straightening iron in my hair as I’m walking by. And yes, the LGBTQWTF outrage mob. I wish they didn’t exist, mostly because they are the ones hurting queer kids. They are making it very difficult for the majority of straight people to give a crap about the plight of gay people. Most of us just want them to shut up now and get back in the closet because they’re annoying. When you try to shame people for eating chicken, you’re not being a good ambassador for your cause. In fact, this kind of behavior only increases the division between us and reinforces the belief that giving in to any demands by the Lavender Mafia is signing our own death warrant.

Professional outrage is getting very old.

Fighting Back Against Indoctrination

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The College Fix posted an article yesterday about a course being taught at the University of North Carolina Wilmington by Dr. Mike Adams.

The article reports:

“What does the evidence say about the claims of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

“Is the criminal justice system really systematically racist?”

“Is there really a rape epidemic on our college campuses?”

“What was that you were saying about white privilege?”

“What was that you were saying about patriarchal oppression?”

These are some of the study prompts for a new class to be offered at the University of North Carolina Wilmington called “Issues in Criminal Justice.” Were these topics taught by a left-leaning scholar, the classroom conversations and readings might have gone one way.

But the class is the brainchild of one of the most well-known and outspoken Christian conservative scholars in the nation — criminology Professor Mike Adams — and he promises that students will finally get a chance to hear how those on the right would answer these questions, and more.

He calls the class “a reasoned response to systematic academic malpractice.”

“Please note that whereas political leftists author virtually all of the readings in your other courses, conservatives and libertarians author most of the readings in this course,” the syllabus states. “This is done so that you will be exposed to beliefs that contradict those of the vast majority of your professors. Often, these dissenting views are presented only as caricatures. In this class, you will hear from the proponents of such views directly.”

Among the required reading list: Mike Lee’s “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document”; John Lott Jr.’s “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime And Gun Control Laws”; K.C. Johnson’s and Stuart Taylor’s “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack On Due Process At America’s Universities”; and Heather Mac Donald’s “The War On Cops: How The Attack On Law And Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.”

The article concludes:

Adams said he is disappointed in how his colleagues no longer teach both sides of an issue.

“There’s a legitimate question as to whether all my colleagues are just incompetent or whether it’s just that they have a moral compass that points to them,” Adams told The Fix. “I’m really trying to figure out if they’re intellectually herniated or just morally herniated. But in all likelihood it’s improper to attribute it to one or the other. It’s got to be a combination because the situation has just gotten so bad. I just have to teach a course like this one.”

Adams made national headlines in 2014 when he won a seven-year court battle against the University of North Carolina Wilmington for retaliating against him for his conservative, Christian views. As part of the settlement, campus leaders agreed to adopt procedures protecting Adams from renewed retaliation.

Adams told The Fix that in light of his past experiences, he is not worried about his academic freedom or the pushback this class might receive from some corners of campus. In fact, he added, controversy is one sign of robust intellectual diversity.

“I’m worried if I don’t cause controversy,” he said. “I’m extremely worried about that. A lack of controversy on college campuses is a sign of sickness and intellectual atrophy.”

Thank you, Dr. Adams, you are a courageous man who is making a difference.

Comments On John Bolton And Robert O’Brien

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I haven’t said anything about John Bolton’s leaving the White House. I think John Bolton is an honorable man who has served his country well. I also think some of his ideas were not in harmony with the ideas of President Trump. John Bolton sees traditional war as an option is almost all cases. I think the time has come to put the idea of traditional war on the back burner. We now live in the era of cyber wars, trade wars, ‘Nintendo wars’ and wars that involve the theft of intellectual property. Because of the great political divide in America, America is not capable right now of fighting a war until we win. The politics in Washington are such that war is used as an opportunity to bash the other party rather than to advance the cause of peace, freedom, or our national security.

Robert O’Brien has been appointed to replace John Bolton as National Security Advisor.

According to a post today at The Conservative Treehouse:

Robert C O’Brien … is currently the State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.  A founding partner of the Los Angeles-based law firm Larson O’Brien.

NYT – Mr. O’Brien served with Mr. Bolton when he was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and has advised Republican candidates like Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz. In both the Bush and Obama administrations, Mr. O’Brien worked on an initiative to train lawyers and judges in Afghanistan.  (link)

People describe O’Brien as similar to his friend John Bolton without the virulent twitchy trigger finger. In his capacity as special envoy for hostage affairs, O’Brien wrote a letter to Swedish prosecutors urging them to release A$AP Rocky.  According to CBS O’Brien’s work “on Rocky’s case endeared him to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his top advisers.”

I believe Mr. O’Brien is the right person for this job. His links to some mainstream Republicans may help heal some of the divisions in the party. It also seems that he has some very strong diplomatic skills.

We need to understand that there is an effort to draw America into another war in the Middle East. The effort is underwritten by the globalist community that seeks to weaken America. America is one of the last obstacles to global governance. Americans like our freedom. We like our inexpensive energy. We like our prosperity and our growing economy. We like our economic mobility–the ability to move from poverty to the middle class to wealth. Note that these are the things that the radicals in our country are attacking. As long as America is strong and its people have hope, we will remain free and continue to be an obstacle to those who seek global power.

An Interesting Post From Another Writer

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Why Solopreneurs Can Thrive in the Digital Age

There are few goals bigger and more rewarding than running a successful company on your own. Not too long ago, this was a desperately prohibitive idea, and a path few had the means to follow. Today, solopreneurs can see their ideas grow thanks to increased access to technology.

Solopreneurs vs. Entrepreneurs

To understand why solopreneurs have such an advantage in the digital age, we must first take a look at how they’re different from entrepreneurs. Simply put, a solopreneur is a business owner who starts a company without planning to add any regular staff members. An entrepreneur may start a company on their own, but over time, they intend to build an employee base around themselves to support the work required to make the business thrive.

A solopreneur prefers to have complete creative and managerial control over their business. They may hire contract workers or outsource tasks to consulting companies, but their ultimate goal is to directly handle both the big picture and day-to-day tasks in the long term.

In the past, solopreneurs would have had little means to do the work of running a business on their own. As a result, they would either be forced to transition to a more traditional form of business ownership, or they’d face major burnout. Fortunately, the advent of technology allows intrepid individuals to strike out and manage their companies their way. So, here are a few ways tech can help you and your business thrive.

The Best Tools

As recently as two decades ago, the average person didn’t walk around with a fully functioning computer in their pocket. Today, 81 percent of Americans own a smartphone. Odds are good most solopreneurs start off with a calendar, calculator, web browser and a phone all in one device. Depending on your phone’s capabilities, that list of available tools gets much longer.

However, this tool can wind up letting you down if you don’t have reliable service. Make sure your provider has the coverage and data capabilities to support you, whether you need to call a client or post an update to your website. You’re probably going to wind up talking, texting, and using more data as a business owner than you did before. As such, make sure you choose a cell plan — whether it’s a multi-line business option or a regular unlimited plan with a few more bells and whistles — that matches your budget and your needs.

Access to Great People

Once, business owners were limited to traditional professional networking — seeking people out at conferences or events, or begging an old coworker to set up an introduction. Although those options are still available (and still useful!), digital connectivity has brought those walls down.

 

If you want to get to know a solopreneur you admire across the country, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn. Want to pick an industry leader’s brain? Email him through his website, or follow his blog. Your access to valuable connections is nearly unlimited in the modern age.

Client and Customer Contact

Thanks to the internet, business owners today have their customers right at their fingertips. From your business website to social media to review sites, there are so many different ways for you to get customer feedback and create connections.

As a solopreneur, it’s important to have an ear to the ground when it comes to your social media sites and website contact page. If someone reaches out to you, it’s vital that you respond promptly – a fast reply keeps you on their mind and improves the power of the connection.

Online customer or client connections can go both ways, as well. Make a point of regularly reaching out to potential clients with pitches tailored to their needs. The more personalized you can make it, the better. It’s not enough to show that your business is great: You need to prove your business will be great for them.

Running a company all on your own is a big task, but there’s never been a better time to take that task on. Make the most of the tools available to you, and you can see your business soar.

 

Photo Credit: Pixabay

 

 

 

An Illustration Of Chutzpah

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Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported that two illegal aliens are suing the Trump administration to make sure they can continue to receive taxpayer money in the form of welfare and still be able to obtain green cards to permanently stay in the country. The two illegal aliens were granted the right to stay in the United States by Barack Obama through the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. I’m glad they are so grateful for being allowed to stay that they are suing the country so they can receive money they have not earned. How do illegal aliens have legal standing in America?

The article reports:

The open borders group CASA de Maryland and two DACA illegal aliens are suing the Trump administration over its soon-to-be enforcement of the ‘public charge’ rule, which would save American taxpayers billions by effectively ending welfare-dependent legal immigration to the U.S.,” Breitbart reports. “The regulation prevents legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. by obtaining green cards so long as they are found to have used or likely to use welfare programs like food stamps and subsidized health care.”

The illegal aliens were granted a shield from deportation by Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Trump has banned welfare-dependent legal immigrants from resettling in the United States. American taxpayers now spend nearly $60 billion a year to pay for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs for some 1.5 million low-skilled legal immigrants every year.

“The new rule would allow immigration officials to deny [Lawful Permanent Resident] status to many immigrants in an arbitrary and discriminatory way,” Amy Marshak, senior counsel at ICAP, said in a statement. “This is by design. President Trump and his advisors have expressed animus toward non-white immigrants, and studies already have shown that the new rule will disproportionately affect immigrants of color.”

Why would the new rule ‘disproportionately affect immigrants of color’? Are you saying that immigrants of color are less able to support themselves than other immigrants? Isn’t that racist?

Consider what it happening here. You want to break into the country (that’s what entering illegally is), take money from people who earned it, and then sue the country because they don’t want to take on the burden of granting citizenship to people who can’t support themselves. Wow.

To quote the movie “Men in Black,” “We’re not hosting an intergalactic kegger down here.”

Who Is Felix Satar?

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On September 16th Judicial Watch posted the following:

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice seeking all records of communications, including FBI 302 interview reports and offer agreements between former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and Felix Sater, a former Trump organization official who was recently confirmed to be an informant for the FBI and CIA. Sater reportedly pushed a Russian real estate deal in 2016 while working at the Trump organization.

Sater reportedly “began working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, after he was caught in a stock-fraud scheme.” It was Andrew Weissmann who, as supervising assistant U.S. attorney, signed the agreement that brought Sater on as a government informant. Federal prosecutors wrote a letter to Sater’s sentencing judge on August 27, 2009, in an effort to get him a lighter sentence: “Sater’s cooperation was of a depth and breadth rarely seen.”

Sater also was reportedly a CIA informant in the mid-2000s for the CIA during his undercover work with Russian military and intelligence officers.

The Mueller report mentions Sater more than 100 times but fails to mention that he was an active undercover informant for the FBI/CIA for more than two decades. In 2017, Sater was the subject of two interviews conducted under a proffer agreement with Mueller’s office according to page 69, footnote 304 of Mueller’s report on his Russian collusion investigation.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia after Mueller’s office, a component of the DOJ, failed to respond to a June 12, 2019, FOIA request for FBI “302” interview reports of Sater that are referred to in the Mueller report; any offer agreements between Sater and the U.S. government; and records of communications between Sater and government employees (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-02568)).

In a June 25, 2019 report, Judicial Watch chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison highlighted that:

Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for [Trump attorney Michael] Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization, to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners.

Though his proposal appears to have been rejected by the Trump campaign, Sater persisted. “Into the spring of 2016,” the Mueller Report notes, “Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow.” Sater emails Cohen that he is trying to arrange a meeting between “the 2 big guys,” Putin and Trump.

Sater’s re-emergence “suggests the possibility of a more sinister counter-narrative: that someone may have been trying to lure Trump into a trap—a politically damaging entanglement with Moscow money,” Morrison wrote.

Sater reportedly testified for eight hours in a closed-door session before the Schiff-led intelligence committee on July 9, 2019. Sater previously said he believes the Trump Tower Moscow project was no different from other Trump real estate projects that were also in the works. “I have worked on probably five or six Trump Tower projects in the United States and at least that many internationally….”

“Was a Russian real estate deal being pushed on the Trump Organization part of a set-up by a FBI/CIA informant?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The new Judicial Watch lawsuit attempts to shed light on what could be another aspect of Deep State abusive Spygate operation targeting President Trump.”

This is just ugly. As more of this information comes out, I hope there is a huge outcry from the public to put the people responsible for misusing government agencies in jail. If that does not happen, we no longer have a justice system in America.

We’ve Heard This Song Before

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Fox News posted an article today that details some of the dire predictions we have heard in the past regarding the future of the earth. The article is in response to some of the recent claims made by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other pseudo-scientists.

The article reports:

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.

.Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that “another ice age” was imminent. “Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century.” The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist’s claim that the world could be “as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”

Some of the more dire predictions came from Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who famously urged population control to mitigate the impacts of humans on the environment. Ehrlich, in 1969, warned that “everybody” would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,” The New York Times reported.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Ehrlich, warning of a “disastrous” famine,” urged placing “sterilizing agents into staple foods and drinking water.”

About the prediction of oceans rising and obliterating major cities–a science-oriented friend of mine pointed out that when ice melts in a glass of water, the water level stays the same–it doesn’t overflow the glass.

At any rate, the earth is in a warming stage. The earth periodically goes through warming stages. Warming stages have to do with sun spots, the earth’s orbit, and other natural occurrences. The earth went through warming stages before man even thought of burning carbon-based fuel. And last of all, man is simply not important enough to control the climate. However, the climate is important enough to be used by men to control a population that power-hungry politicians seek to control.

When Is Higher Education Against Diversity?

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Yesterday Christian Headlines posted an article with the following headline, “Duke University’s Student Government Rejects Young Life over LGBTQ Policies.”

The article reports:

Duke University’s student government has denied the Christian organization Young Life official status as a student group on campus, citing its policy on sexuality.

The decision by the Duke Student Government Senate on Wednesday (Sept. 11) comes amid ongoing clashes nationwide between religious student groups and colleges and universities that have added more robust nondiscrimination policies.

Young Life, like many evangelical groups, regards same-sex relations as sinful. Its policy forbids LGBTQ staff and volunteers from holding positions in the organization.

The student newspaper the Duke Chronicle reported Thursday that the student government senate unanimously turned down official recognition for the Young Life chapter, because it appeared to violate a guideline that every Duke student group include a nondiscrimination statement in its constitution. 

Young Life, which is based in Colorado Springs, is a 78-year-old organization with a mission to introduce adolescents to Christianity and help them grow in their faith. It has chapters in middle schools, high schools and colleges in all 50 states and more than 90 countries around the world.

But the student government objected to a clause in Young Life’s sexuality policy. After the student government was told the organization would not change its sexuality policy, it rejected the group.

The Young Life policy states: “We do not in any way wish to exclude persons who engage in sexual misconduct or who practice a homosexual lifestyle from being recipients of ministry of God’s grace and mercy as expressed in Jesus Christ. We do, however, believe that such persons are not to serve as staff or volunteers in the mission and work of Young Life.”

So following the Biblical guidelines on sexuality (both heterosexuality and homosexuality) will prevent your Christian group from being recognized on a College Campus.

The article concludes:

Over the past two decades, many colleges and universities have attempted to exclude religious groups because of their positions on sexuality, among them InterVarsity and Business Leaders in Christ.

Greg Jao, senior assistant to the president at InterVarsity, said about 70 colleges and universities have attempted to exclude InterVarsity chapters over the years — in some cases because it bars LGBTQ employees, in others because its faith statement more generally violates school nondiscrimination policies.

In most cases, the issues are resolved, but others have ended up in court. InterVarsity is now suing the University of Iowa and Wayne State University.

“Most of the time universities back down because it’s a violation of students’ First Amendment rights,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that defends religious freedom cases.

Duke, however, may be in a different category as a private institution. Private universities don’t have the same obligations under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause that a government entity does.

As a private entity, Duke may actually be able to do this, but any Christian who sends their child to Duke is supporting an anti-Christian agenda.

Sometimes Warnings Are There For A Reason

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Common sense is not a flower that grows in everyone’s garden. When someone warns you about something, they may actually know something you do not.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about bloggers Jolie King and Mark Firkin. They announced in 2017 that they would be going on an international trip to “try to break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad rap in the media.” What could possibly go wrong?

Last Thursday, the BBC reported:

Two Australian citizens detained in Iran have been identified as Jolie King and Mark Firkin.

Ms King, who also holds a UK passport, and Mr Firkin were blogging their travels in Asia and the Middle East.

They were reportedly arrested 10 weeks ago near Tehran but news of the arrest, and that of another British-Australian woman, came to light on Wednesday.

Australia said it had repeatedly raised their cases with Tehran, including in a meeting between officials last week.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne said she had lobbied on their behalf in a meeting with her Iranian counterpart.

She described the detentions as “a matter of deep concern” on Thursday, and confirmed that assistance had been offered to the families of the three detainees.

“[We] hope to see Mark and Jolie safely home as soon as possible,” their families said on Thursday.

The situation comes amid growing tensions between the West and Iran.

Several dual nationals have been detained in Iran in recent years, including the British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Relations between the UK and Iran have also been strained in recent months by a row over the seizure of oil tankers in the Gulf.

I guess maybe the media discourages people from traveling to certain places for a reason. We need to remember that not every country in the world plays by the same rules.

 

Going Back To The Origins Of The Problem

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I’ve done a couple of articles recently on the charges against Brett Kavanaugh (here and here), but there is one fact that is continuously overlooked by people reporting the story. On September 4th, Townhall posted an article with the following headline, “Christine Blasey Ford’s Lawyer: Okay Fine, Protecting Abortion Was Part of Why She Accused Kavanaugh.” What? So it’s okay to attempt to ruin a man’s marriage, career, and life in order to protect abortion?! That’s sick.

Then we have another article from Townhall about The New York Times again bringing up those charges in a new attempt to smear Justice Kavanaugh. But there is a problem. The supposed victim has no memory of the incident described by Max Stier who coincidentally represented Bill Clinton when Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

This is disgusting, and it needs to end. It is time for Justice Kavanaugh to sue the people making the allegations and demand to see the proof of those allegations. The allegations are at least thirty-five years old, and there seems to be no evidence of a pattern. I suspect that certain Democrat operatives would pay serious money for any woman willing to come forward and charge Justice Kavanaugh with improper conduct some time in the past ten years. However, at this point no one who is paying attention would believe the charges. The Democrat slander campaign has backfired.

This Is What American Enterprise Looks Like

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President Trump has made a lot of money. He is evidently a smart businessman who understands how to create, market, and sell an idea. He is using those skills to raise money for his 2020 presidential campaign.

The Daily Caller posted an article Saturday about one of the Trump campaign’s more creative ways to raise campaign funds.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump’s move to sell merchandise as a means of piggybacking off his recent media antics has managed to net his campaign nearly $1 million in donations.

The campaign has sold nearly 55,000 packs of plastic straws, netting over $823,000 in sales, whereas campaign officials have sold about $50,000 worth of Sharpie pens, campaign communication director Tim Murtaugh told The New York Times.

More than a third of the people who purchased the straws had never donated to the campaign, Murtaugh said.

Trump began selling the Sharpies on Sept. 6 to raise money after CNN criticized him for supposedly using a pen on a map to alter Hurricane Dorian’s trajectory. The president doubled down on a tweet suggesting the storm would hit Alabama after many in the media tried to correct him, showing a map of the path of the hurricane that had been altered with a Sharpie.

“Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and the rest of the fake news crazy!” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a tweet announcing the marketing ploy.

This is a fantastic example of how to raise campaign funds and drive the media crazy. This is the way marketing works.

Fighting Back Legally

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The American Spectator posted an article today about the ongoing legal case of General Flynn. As you know, General Flynn’s new lawyer, Sidney Powell, is the author of the book Licensed to Lie, which details government abuses in cases against Enron and Ted Stevens among others. Ms. Powell has a very clear understanding of prosecutorial misconduct and how to deal with it.

The article at The American Spectator details a case in which a policeman charged with rape was able to get the charges dropped by shedding light on the actions of the prosecutors regarding the witnesses. The article refers to this as ‘graymail’ and suggests that this tactic will be used by Ms. Powell to defend General Flynn.

The article reports:

As you may recall, there are many disturbing questions surrounding the federal government’s investigation, arrest, and prosecution of Flynn. Although he has pled guilty to a flimsy and corruptly contrived charge of lying to the FBI, that plea came about after he had — according to media reports — bankrupted himself by paying $4 million in legal fees to the Washington law firm that represented him prior to Powell. In short, it appears that Flynn pled guilty because he couldn’t afford any more justice.

In addition to the law firm’s impressive professional achievement of turning a mere guilty plea proceeding into a reported $4 million payday, the known facts and circumstances surrounding the Flynn case are equally remarkable. We know that the charges arise out of an ambush interview orchestrated by former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe regarding contacts that Flynn, the incoming Trump administration’s National Security Adviser, had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. According to Powell’s thorough, broadly worded, and aggressive discovery motion, recently produced (and previously withheld) government documents disclosed that “Flynn passed his polygraph test in 2016 and his security clearance was renewed. This was at the same time the FBI seems to have been investigating him under the pretext that he was an ‘agent of Russia’ and/or of Turkey. Interestingly, the new production also shows that [former Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper refused to assist in the investigation for Mr. Flynn’s security clearance, which Mr. Flynn received after a full investigation despite Mr. Clapper’s actions.” In addition, at the bar of the Court, Powell advised U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan that the recently disclosed documents showed the government had concluded that Flynn was neither a Russian nor a Turkish agent.

The article notes:

So why and how was Flynn targeted for destruction by the FBI and Justice Department? Powell’s discovery motion seeks answers to these questions by demanding the production of evidence exposing the links between the investigation and prosecution of Flynn to the Obama administration’s efforts to target, spy on, and frame Donald Trump.

The article goes on to list the documents requested.

The article concludes:

Moreover, if Judge Sullivan grants the defense even partial relief, the prosecutors will then be faced with a bitter choice, to wit:

(a) They can produce the damning evidence of the government’s corrupt activities in order to continue the prosecution of their ludicrous and petty false statements case against Flynn. Or (b) the prosecutors can do the smart thing by dropping the charges and quietly disappearing into the witness protection program.

If the prosecutors want my advice, in the event Judge Sullivan grants any part of Powell’s lethal motion, they should pick option (b) and ask the U.S. Marshal’s Service to relocate them to Arizona. I hear it’s nice there in the winter, and retirees can live comfortably on even a modest government pension.

I really like Plan B.

A Few Notes On A Previous Post

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Yesterday I posted an article about the latest attack on Justice Kavanaugh published in The New York Times. As more information comes out, it becomes even more obvious that this is a political hit job. Below are a few sources and quotes.

From The Daily Caller today:

The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday’s paper that has since been corrected.

From The Federalist today:

The New York Times has finally admitted that the premise of its much-hyped story about an alleged incident with United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was false, as the alleged victim says she has no recollection of the incident in question.

The admission undermines what was an already weak story of dubious credibility.

From PJ Media yesterday:

On Saturday, The New York Times ran a story repeating allegations that Brett Kavanaugh was drunk at a party in college and had his genitals thrust into a woman’s face. The allegation has not been confirmed, and friends of the alleged victim say she has no recollection of the events. The man telling the story, Max Stier, represented Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

The mainstream media used to do investigative reporting. The fact that they no longer investigate allegations against conservatives or Republicans is one of the reasons the alternative media is flourishing. The New York Times story is a prime example of a political hit job disguised as a news article.

As I have previously stated, there should be a penalty for making unsubstantiated allegations against any public figure.

This Kind Of Logic Makes My Head Hurt

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On Friday, CNS News posted an article about a recent statement by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The article reports:

Using money earmarked for construction projects to build a wall to secure the border “is bad for security of our border” and is “undermining our national security,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday.

President Donald Trump’s decision to reallocate $3.6 billion to fund border wall construction is an “assault on Congress’s power of the purse,” Pelosi said in opening remarks at her weekly press conference:

“The President’s decision to cancel $3.6 billion for military construction initiatives makes us less safe by undermining our national security and the quality and life and the morale of our troops. And it dishonors the Constitution of the United States as the President negates the Constitution’s most fundamental principle, the principle of checks and balances, the separation of powers and his assault on the Congress’s power of the purse.

“The decision is bad for security of our border, for the security of our nation and the well‑being of our children.

How is securing our border bad for the security of our border?

It’s always about the children. What about the children who are in overcrowded classrooms due to the influx of illegal immigrants? What about the children who have contracted diseases because illegal immigrants rarely have the vaccines that American children have? What about the children whose parents are working for lower wages because illegal aliens will work for less?

The Democrat party has lost its way on national security. They are simply ignoring the negative impact of illegal immigration in order to promote a political agenda.

It’s Time For People Making Unsubstantiated Allegations To Pay A Price

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Donald Trump is President and Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court Judge. Those are facts. Unfortunately the political left’s personal destruction machine has been doing its best to undo these facts. The latest charges against Justice Kavanaugh are not even remembered by the person supposedly involved.

The National Review posted an article today about the ‘new’ charges.

The article reports:

If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”

The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation.

I am not repeating the charge because this blog is rated G.

The article continues:

None of these details corroborates her accusation against Kavanaugh. But the story is framed to make it seem like Kavanaugh was the type of privileged jerk who might expose himself in front of an under-privileged college classmate.

As I wrote last October, here’s why Ramirez’s allegation was dubious:

Deborah Ramirez is the Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who now claims that Kavanaugh exposed himself as a college freshman at a party. Ramirez’s claim was already dubious because (1) named eyewitnesses deny the allegation and (2) Ramirez herself wasn’t sure in recent weeks if Kavanaugh had done what she now alleges. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself,” the New York Times reported. Ramirez was only willing to make the allegation, the New Yorker reported, after “six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney.”

This is a ridiculous attempt to smear a Justice the left does not like. One article I read noticed that the timing of this might be an indication that the left is worried about the health of Justice Ginsburg.

The article concludes:

Pogrebin and Kelly write that a couple of students say they had heard about the alleged incident in the days after it allegedly occurred, but the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to corroborate the allegation. 

We already knew before Kavanaugh was confirmed last October that the “corroborating” source for Ramirez’s claim, classmate Kenneth Appold, was not present when the alleged incident occurred, but Appold told the New Yorker he was “one-hundred-percent-sure” he heard about it from an eyewitness. Shortly before Kavanaugh was confirmed, the New Yorker reported that Appold’s supposed eyewitness “said that he had no memory of the incident.”

Maybe Pogrebin and Kelly’s book is stronger than their essay. But I’m skeptical. “In the end they turn up no smoking gun,” Hanna Rosin writes in her New York Times review of the book.

Until there is a penalty paid for unsubstantiated charges, the accusations will continue. For further information about the validity of the charges against Justice Kavanaugh and the motives behind those charges see this September 4th article at Townhall. The people behind the false charges need to pay a price.

If You Wondered Why Energy Independence Is Important

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The Wall Street Journal posted an article yesterday about the drone attack on Saudi oil fields. The Iran-allied Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen have claimed credit for the attack.

The article reports:

The production shutdown amounts to a loss of about 5.7 million barrels a day, the kingdom’s national oil company said, roughly 5% of the world’s daily production of crude oil.

Officials said they hoped to restore production to its regular level of 9.8 million barrels a day by Monday. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said lost production would be offset through supplies of oil already on hand.

The strikes mark the latest in a series of attacks on the country’s petroleum assets in recent months, as tensions rise among Iran and its proxies like the Houthis, and the U.S. and partners like Saudi Arabia. The attacks could drive up oil prices if the Saudis can’t turn production back on quickly and potentially rattle investor confidence in an initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company.

The article concludes:

The Yemen war is a central front in a new and more aggressive foreign policy overseen by Prince Mohammed, who launched the intervention with a coalition of allied states in 2015. Under the prince’s watch, the kingdom also applied a blockade on neighboring Qatar, detained Lebanon’s prime minister, and sent a team of men to kill exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018.

A conservative kingdom with a Sunni Muslim majority, Saudi Arabia has been an opponent of Iran in a struggle for power across the broader Middle East since the 1979 revolution that toppled Iran’s monarchy.

The attacks on Aramco’s facilities are poorly timed for Aramco’s coming IPO and pose a challenge to oil officials after a changing of the guard in their leadership. Aramco last week picked seven international banks to help it list on Saudi Arabia’s domestic exchange, an IPO that could value the company at about $2 trillion dollars and come before the end of the year.

There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes here. This is part of the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. At their core, both the Saudis and the Iranians want to bring back the former caliphate. The Ottoman Empire (which was that caliphate) existed until the early 1900’s. Many Muslims want that Empire restored. The argument is over who will rule the caliphate when it is established. Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are players in this conflict, as is ISIS. Jamal Khashoggi was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Descriptions of him as simply a journalist were misleading. Another part of this puzzle is the fact that Saudi Arabia is drawing closer to aligning with Israel because of the fear of a nuclear Iran. That also would be a cause for increased aggression from Iran.

Generally speaking, any terrorism that goes on in the Middle East can be traced back to Iran. They have been training and funding terrorists since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

I have no idea what impact this will have on world oil prices. I do know that Saudi Arabia will work to repair the damage as soon as possible. I have no doubt that Iran is violating the sanctions on its oil exports, so if the price of oil rises significantly, Iran may be able to pull itself out of its current economic difficulties and calm its population. America will continue to prosper as oil prices rise because we are now a net exporter of oil rather than a net importer. Because of the policies of President Trump, we are in a very different situation than we were during the oil crisis of the 1970’s.