Offshore oil drilling

From Pat Lang:

Larry Kudlow, the financial whiz, was on the Joe Scarborough show on MSNBC today. He repeated his unending mantra of "drill, drill, drill," as a way out of the current wilderness of high priced crude.
...
"Approval of drilling will frighten the futures traders out of the market and the price will go a long way down." "They are already leaving the oil futures market" he went on. "This will push them out even faster."

So basically the logic behind expanding offshore drilling is that speculation is a big reason for high oil prices, and that drilling will frighten speculators into thinking that the price will go down in the future, thus they will get out of the market and the price will go down right away. But if you think that the price of oil is high because of expanding demand and future shrinking supply, then offshore drilling would do absolutely nothing to oil prices, because it would contribute less than 1% to world oil supply:

Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

Also, check out this interesting article Flanders sent me on speculators, The Speculator as Hero:

The miracle is that in taking care of ourselves, we speculators somehow ensure that producers all over the world will provide the right quantity and quality of goods at the proper time, without undue waste, and that this meshes with what people want and the money they have available.

Revs win the Superliga

The Revs won the 2008 Superliga last night, beating Houston in the eighth round of penalty kicks after overtime ended 2-2. See the video here. It was a fantastic, wide-open and attacking game played by two teams who clearly respected each other - all this action despite the fact that the teams had agreed to split the prize money evenly between them no matter who won due to a dispute between MLS management and the players union. The Revs knocked off three Mexican teams 1-0 and tied Chivas USA to make it to the final.

This is only the first of four titles the Revs can win this season....

Lazio almost bought by the mob

The Italian police unfortunately stopped Italian football club Lazio from gaining the owners they deserve. Current Lazio club president Giorgio Chinaglia has been the run from Italian cops in the U.S. since 2006 for some financial shenanigans. Now the Casalesi clan in the Camorra (an organized crime group, basically Naples' version of Sicily's Cosa Nostra) tried to buy Lazio with laundered money.

Lazio fans are typically fascist. This actually is not an exaggeration: Der Spiegel has a picture of Lazio fans standing en masse holding a sign that reads "Auchwitz is your home, the ovens your houses"; they also had a sign rhyming the club Livorno's name with "forno", the Italian name for oven (Livorno is a Leftist/Communist club and the city had a lot of Jews before WW2), their most popular player was known for giving the Hitler salute to the fans; they wave pictures of Bennito Mussolini in the stands; Lazio fans honored Arkan, the Serb guilty of war crimes in Bosnia (and a friend to Sinisa Mihailovic, a Serb who plays for Lazio); I could go on but you get the idea.

It would be true irony if this club was stuck with the Camorra as owners. Unfortunately I am not an expert in Italian organized crime but Wikipedia says that the Camorra owns the rights for trash disposal in Naples - you might have heard about the trash piling up in Naples recently.

Money in the soccer world is extremely liquid (like in the recent Carlos Tevez deal) and the sums are very large (bigger than the local pizza parlor), which I guess makes it attractive to rich criminals. My guess is that given the exceptional liquidity of money in football (another word might be corruption), owning a football club would be a great part of a money laundering chain for a large organized criminal organization with a lot of cash to clean.

I leave you with a picture of true Lazio fans:



Too bad these guys didn't get screwed.

Break radio silence

Brief updates:

My fiance and I are now married.

We went on a honeymoon to Alaska:
We got a kitten and named her Oomi, short for Oomingmak, the Eskimo word for Musk Ox, of which we saw some in Alaska. Oomingmak means "bearded one" - Oomi has some white fur where a beard might be. Check out her attack the blinds at the bottom of the post.

I am now back at work, but going to this conference next week.

Lots of stuff happening over in Mali and Niger re: the Tuareg rebellion, but no time to write on it. Al Jazeera has got a reporter in there and put out a few stories on it. Still ignored by the American press. On request I put up some stuff over at www.counterinsurgencylibrary.org, including a copy of my thesis (available as a pdf here) if you would like to read it.

Another blogger that just broke radio silence is Pat - go read his post about his idea of creating a money stream to politicians that can be turned off when they do bad stuff, like Obama voting for amnesty for telecom companies that broke the law. It would be easy to implement and effective at showing politicians that people actually care about issues that the media ignores.

I will get back to blogging once I figure out where to fit it in my schedule.

Now for Oomi!

Climate change and intel

A quick told-ya-so post. Two items over at the Washington Independent: first, the IC did a National Intelligence Estimate relating to climate change, and second, Spencer Ackerman points out that a lot of people were strangely against the idea. I tried for a while to make a pun relating global warming to the acronym HoTS but I failed.

My former Congressman, Ed Markey, helped push this thing along - the requirement for the NIE didn't come from the DNI but came from Congress. Click here to see the discussion between myself, Mike Tanji (at afore-mentioned HoTS) and the mysterious folks at the now-abandoned Kent's Imperative last year when the requirement was handed down. Of course time will tell whether the NIE is any good (we'll have to wait until its leaked) and leads to better decisions being made, but I think it is a good sign that it is at least being taken seriously.

The Meme of Seven

I have been tagged by Eddie and Peter in a meme.

The Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. This is the second time I am writing this post because blogger crapped out yesterday and ate the post.

2. Tomorrow, while my fiance will be working her tail off taking the boards exams, I will be relaxing watching Netherlands vs. Russia in the Euro2008 quarterfinal, and hoping to see my dad on TV (he has tickets and will be at the game!).

3. I think blog memes are a cool way of tracing networks of blogs.

4. I haven't updated my blog in a long time because of internet problems at home - it's not that I lost interest...

5. Everyone should go read/listen to my sister's interview of a big fancy-pants (literally - they wear fancy pants) music star, Stephen Connolly of the King's Singers.

6. I asked my fiance for a random fact about me and she said "you like soccer."

7. I am tagging Pat 7 times because he hasn't updated his blog in nine months.

Sageman vs. Hoffman

After the Grand Masta's chidings, I have a post up at Arabic Mediashack on the dustup between Marc Sageman and Bruce Hoffman over where to focus anti-Al Qaeda efforts.

Schadenfreude

I have been busy lately so I haven't posted much on soccer, but I can't resist noting this game. I love it when Italy loses.

Oil, politics, and climate in the Tuareg insurgencies

There have been some new developments in the Tuareg insurgencies in Mali and Niger. First, China and Niger have come to an oil deal that will give the Nigerien government five billion dollars. Secondly and possibly related, the MNJ in Niger has (finally) split. Also, the relationship between climate change and conflict has been getting some attention regarding the Tuareg rebellion. This post will look at the oil deal - I will write later on the MNJ split and the relationship between environmental change and conflict.

First, the oil deal. From Reuters:

China's state oil company has won a $5 billion deal to develop oil reserves in eastern Niger in the latest major Chinese investment to secure energy resources in Africa...
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) agreed to bring into production within three years the large Agadem block, which has proven reserves so far of 324 million barrels, Niger's government said.

Five billion dollars over ten or so years. For comparison, Niger's GDP is between nine billion and four billion dollars depending on how you calculate it. Also from the Reuters article:

Niger's eastern Diffa region has been relatively unaffected by a year-old revolt by Tuareg-led rebels who mostly operate in the country's northern desert region of Agadez.

Well, not quite. The MNJ has allied with a Toubou (the nomadic people that live in eastern Niger) rebel group, the FARS. Back in April, they led an attack against Nigerien soldiers around Diffa (possibly with an MNJ official, Kindo Zada, who had experience in Diffa as a Nigerien soldier). Previous to this oil deal, there wasn't really any economic motive for the Toubou to fight - they occasionally kidnapped tourists or soldiers for cash, but didn't really have any solid political objectives other than to be left alone by the central government. Now there is five billion dollars worth of oil under Toubou land.

Another consequence of an oil industry may be the further deterioration of the agriculture sector, as workers leave subsistence agriculture and pastoralism to compete for oil jobs. This has happened in other African countries (Gabon, Angola, Congo, etc.), well documented and explained by Nicholas Shaxson in his book Poisoned Wells which I'm in the middle of right now. The deterioration of agriculture could lead to further famines and unemployment (it's hard to start up a herd again once you've sold it off), conditions which have fostered the violence in Tuareg areas.

This post will be continued (when I have time) to look at the possible relationship between the Chinese oil deal and the MNJ split, as well as looking at Adam Wolfe's post on climate change and conflict in the Sahel.

Abu Muqawama

It's old news now that Abu Muqawama, A.K.A. Andrew Exum, has retired from blogging (temporarily I'm sure). What I hadn't noticed, due to reading Abu Muqawama via Google Reader, was that the Abu Muqawama comment section may be in the process of jumping the shark. A couple months ago you had great comment threads like this one. Now you have a 90 comment thread where anonymous trolls yell "defeatocrat" at each other. "I RED DUG FEITHS BOOK AND HE SEZ UR WRONG!@!!!1" I imagine the blog's remaining authors are too busy with their actual jobs to monitor the comment threads, although Dr. iRack smacks a few fools down in that last link.