“Ill-informed and
objectionable”;
“You
poisonous, bigoted, ignorant, verbose little wa*ker”
(except I'm not little - 1.97m).
-
Reader comments.
Muses, commentary and links, on various subjects,
international, political, economic, quirky, other (with sometime leanings towards Ireland),
by me, Tony, here in Dublin, Ireland. Pet Hate: Unlawful killing and
harming of humans.
During the week beginning 17th January, Ireland's nemesis, the Troika, came
to town for its quarterly visit. The Troika comprises the IMF, the ECB
and the EU Commission, the three bodies that have been lending sufficient
money (€65˝ billion) to Ireland to enable
it to continue in business without bothering to eliminate its gigantic
deficit that last year casually added yet another
€25 billion to the national debt of over
€120 bn.
The
price of these loans (wrongly** called a
“bailout”)
is that Ireland's fiscal and economic policies must conform to the Troika's
diktats. Every quarter they come along to check progress on things
like budget cuts and tax increases, and award a gold star for good
performance. (Greece is going through the same process but always gets
a black mark for non-conformance, a source of schadenfreude for the Irish -
tempered with a little envy and admiration at the Greeks' naughtiness.)
**They are
wrongly called a “bailout”
because if you are in a sinking boat and someone gives you a bailout, it
means he scoops out the water and throws it over the side and in time
you are back floating properly again; the water in your boat is gone.
The Troika's so-called bailout, on the other hand
amounts to lending Ireland money that Ireland must then use to repay
loans to creditors, most of them in the home countries of the principal
Troika players - the US, Germany, France. Ireland remains sinking
in just as much debt; it's just that the creditors are now the Troika,
albeit at perhaps lower interest rates than before. Water has been
scooped out of the bow of the boat and deposited in the stern.
The institutions actually being bailed out, in the
sense that their debt reduces, are in fact the creditor banks in
countries other than Ireland. The Troika' is interested in Ireland
only to the extent it can be forced to save those foreign banks.
For if they sink, the consequences for their host countries could be
catastrophic. If Ireland sinks, who cares?
As a result of the latest visit, the Troika once again
gave Ireland a gold star for its
obeisance.
Two press conferences were then held on the same day but
in different venues. First up were a couple of Irish ministers at the
high table:
Michael
Noonan, finance minister
Brendan Howlin,
minister for public expenditure & reform
They made various breezy statements, and a couple of
strange ones.
One of these was that they had secured agreement that perhaps €2 bn of
the proceeds from the sale of state assets could be diverted from paying
down debt to so-called job-creation wheezes. However when this was put
to Istvan Szekely of theTroika in the second press conference, he
clammed up, which in effect was a denial of any such deal.
The dramatis personae for the Troika's conference
comprised
Istvan Szekely,
director of economic and financial affairs at the European Commission
Craig
Beaumont, mission chief for Ireland at the IMF.
Klaus Masuch,
head of EU Countries Division at the European Central Bank
Barbara Nolan,
head of the European Commission representation in Ireland.
I
found the Troika conference pretty outrageous. Here
was a bunch of foreigners spouting to the Irish people via the Irish media
about Irish fiscal policy and performance. And there was not a single Irish
elected politician in sight. I know a separate press conference had just
taken place, but how can Irish politicians just step aside from the Troika's
event and
hide like that?
Elected Irish
representatives, and through them the general Irish populace, have become
mere obedient vassals of the unelected Troika, who like seagulls fly in,
shit on everybody and fly out again.
Top marks, however, to Vincent Browne for
skewering the ECB's
slippery Klaus Masuch (sounds like a German) who only waffled when asked
to justify the demand that Irish taxpayers pay the private gambling losses
of the defunct Anglo Irish Bank. As journalist Michael Lewis
pointed out some months ago, Anglo only ever had six branches and no
ATMs, and its only trade was to borrow tens of billions from European banks and lend
it to developers. It had absolutely nothing to do with the general Irish
public.
Faced with direct questioning, Masuch clammed up in confusion, ably
protected by the Troika's local minder Mrs Nolan (who though Irish is
however a professional EUrocrat on the EU payroll).
Ireland's pain is all about saving German banks from their
own folly and Masuch knows it. Ireland be damned.
Ireland surrendered its sovereignty when it agreed to accept
loans from the Troika as a result of having brainlessly socialised the
private gambling debts of private banks, Anglo Irish among them. What
we have seen this week is that ghastly surrender in action.
Fraccing is an old technique, but due to advances in sophisticated
technology it is enjoying an unparalleled renaissance and creating an
energy revolution of astonishing proportions
The negative publicity that has been swirling round the
world about hydraulic fracturing for the past year or so has been
driving me nuts. Lots of things drive me nuts but usually it is
because I have might have a different opinion about something, for
example whether or not Barack Obama has the faintest idea of his duties
as an American president.
But what drives me nuts about fraccing is not an issue
of opinion but of facts.
Let's start with the word. Within the oil and gas
extraction industry it has been spelt with two Cs for as long as
hydraulic fracturing has been routinely practiced, which is over half a
century. But when the media suddenly woke up to the word they
immediately spelt it fracking, not bothering with even a phone call to
check the correct spelling. Of course these are the same media
people who think
“media” (print, radio, TV, internet etc) is a singular
noun, not the Latinate plural for medium, so they clearly have spelling issues.
Then there's the
“novelty”
of fraccing. But after fifty years of successfully improving
hydrocarbon production rates across the world by applying this
technology, it is by no means a novelty. It is a novelty only for
media too lazy to do a bit of Googling or make a few phone calls.
Finally, there is the environmental threat that fraccing
imposes. Of course anything with that toxic word
“environment”
is an instant publicity-grabber, which is why this entirely invented
scare has gained so much traction. But this merely reflects the
media's boundless enthusiasm for carrying out no research or fact-finding
whatsoever. Emotions rule in that strange world of
illiteracy and sloth.
So let's have a look at what fraccing actually is.
It's all pretty simple.
An oil and/or gas reservoir is not a big swimming pool
waiting to be drained. Think of it instead as a giant, solid
sponge, ie rock full of pores, each pore being filled with, typically, a
bit of water with a bit of oil on top and a bit of gas on top of that.
The ratio of pores to sponge-rock is called the porosity - the higher
the porosity the more fluids are present. The porous sponge-rock
material will usually be
sandstone,
where the pores are the spaces between grains of sand that once lay
on a seabed, or
limestone or
calcium carbonate (former corals, like this lump) whose pores
were once home to tiny marine creatures.
It can also
be shale, a clay-like substance with the minutest pores of all,
invisible to the naked eye.
When a well is drilled into the middle of the porous
sponge-rock, or reservoir rock as it is known, the fluids will flow only
to the extent that one pore is connected to another, which is known as
permeability.
If the pores
are well-connected the oil or gas (or indeed, water) will flow freely.
If the
permeability is poor, it's much harder for fluid to get from one
pore to another and on into the wellbore.
Where both porosity and permeability are low, as they
always are with shales, you can
have a real problem on your hands. This is exacerbated where the
oil happens to be viscous, flowing more like treacle than petrol.
It's a simple concept. A well is drilled through
the reservoir rock layer. Water is then pumped at ever higher
pressure into the reservoir-rock until it simply cracks open. The
resulting fractures make a much larger area of the reservoir-rock open
to the wellbore, which therefore increases the flow of fluids into
the wellbore.
There are refinements of course. For example,
additives
are usually put in the water to reduce friction (make it soapy) and
hence power requirements;
biocides may
be added to kill off any organisms that might flourish and
eventually damage the physical properties of the water;
to keep the
fractures propped open after pumping has ceased,
“proppants” are often added to the water, usually simply sand
grains, but sometimes more sophisticated little lumps;
to help
support the proppants in the water while pumping, further additives
are generally included which thicken the water.
Some of these additives happen to be toxic, so when the
treated water is recovered from the well it is either cleaned to
facilitate safe disposal or else stored for re-use on another well.
This is no different in principle from the way nasty waste water is
responsibly dealt with in countless other industries.
The wells themselves can be very sophisticated when
tackling the low-porosity-low-permeability problem.
Advances in
directional drilling have been key: this is the technology whereby wells
don't have to be drilled vertically, they can be steered in very precise
pre-determined directions through the rock. Though in
former years wells would be drilled vertically before fraccing, these
days such wells will always be turned to a horizontal direction within
the reservoir rock layer which it will then penetrate for a kilometre or
more in order to maximise exposure
to the well bore when fracced.
For the same reason, they will often also be drilled
“multi-laterally”, meaning that as the well enters the
reservoir-rock, it will divide into several distinct fingers reaching
through the reservoir. Individual fraccing operations are then
carried out in sequence, tailored for each such finger.
Modern seismic technology (which
detects the shape of subterranean rock strata by bouncing sound waves
off them) also permits ever smaller reservoirs to be detected.
Using directional drilling techniques, these are then accessed with wells
that snake along tortuous paths several kilometres long, like a
jet-fighter stalking its prey, before veering horizontal and sprouting
fingers. Just imagine the engineering sophistication that causes
all this to happen, when all you - at the surface - can do is
rotate a five-inch diameter pipe that is over
three kilometres long,
pull it up and down,
pump fluid through it,
drop and lower things (eg tools) into it.
Once fracced, the next job is to produce gas and/or oil
from the reservoir in order to get a return on investment. Sometimes,
fraccing alone will suffice. Sometimes flow has to be helped
along (“stimulated”
in the jargon) by for example drilling injection wells nearby,
and pumping fluids (such as steam) down and along their fractures until
the reservoir hydrocarbons are forced into the fractures of the
producing wells. In any event, the end product is oil/gas that
must be treated in conventional fashion before sale.
Now let's have a look at the objections. They
generally fall into six categories.
Fraccing results in hydrocarbons, whose carbon
dioxide emissions are (supposedly) bad for the
environment.
Well, of course the hydrocarbons produced through fraccing contribute to
global CO2, but that is a function of the hydrocarbons, not of the means by
which they are extracted. It's a non-argument. Nevertheless
it's true that it takes more energy to produce oil and gas through
fraccing than when it just gushes out of the ground unaided, but sadly
the days of such easy fossil fuels are gone.
Fraccing results in toxic fluids coming back up
the wellbore.
This is often correct, but again not confined to fracced wells.
Moreover it's a problem only if the fluids are then released
in a raw state into the environment. However, as
mentioned above the toxic fluids are
always either stored for re-use or treated to remove the
toxins, while waste products are (should be) disposed of responsibly, just as
in any other industrial process.
Fraccing can cause subsidence on the surface Groundwater is found at depths of a couple of hundred metres at
most (see for example this cider advertisment). Hydrocarbons are found at depths of thousands of metres.
Fraccing pressures are designed to confine fraccing to the reservoir
rock alone, with each fracture stretching perhaps tens of metres.
To imagine that somehow fractures can extend several kilometres
upwards through multiple strata of rock until they reach the
surface, and that the pumping crews would moreover be blissfully
unaware of the massive extra volumes disappearing down the hole, is
fanciful in the extreme. It doesn't happen; it cannot happen.
Fraccing fluids can cause contamination of ground water.
Just as the subsidence scare is ridiculous, so is the idea that
fraccing fluids can blast their way upwards and unnoticed, through thousands of
metres of solid rock to reach the groundwater reservoirs.
Up to
December 2011 there had not, according to the
Financial Times, been a single proved case of contamination of
water supplies by fraccing fluid being pumped into a
well.
Hydrocarbons produced from fracced wells can cause contamination of ground water.
For similar reasons the produced fluids can also never reach the
groundwater, kilometres above.
This particular scare has been fanned by a polemical
anti-fraccing movie in 2010 called
Gaslands.
It
shows, in a scene (below) that has gone viral, tap water in Colorado
catching fire, so laden is it with gas, supposedly the result of
having fracced deep shales. However, the drinking water supply is in
fact contaminated by
methane seeping from coal seams much closer to the surface than
the fracced shale. The phenomenon long predates any fraccing
operations; moreover the gas has a different chemical signature from that
produced from the shale, and no other examples have been reported of
this occurrence.
Fracced wells present an eyesore for the countryside The drilling rig required to drill a well and the array
of powerful pumps that will frac it are indeed unsightly and
often noisy.
But they are temporary for the duration of construction,
just as road maintenance is disruptive for traffic only
while it is being conducted.
After a well is completed, all
that is left to see is a set of valves (called a
“Christmas Tree”) perhaps three metres high, which
can easily be fenced off and hidden, while burying the
control cables and the pipeline that takes away the produced
fluids.
Furthermore, due to multilateral technology, each well is, in
effect, usually several wells, thus minimising the number of
Christmas Trees. Moreover, the technology of
directional drilling allows the wells to spread their tentacles wide for several kilometeres in all directions, such that the Christmas
Trees themselves can be positioned close together. This allows the
wells to be fenced off in a relatively small area and hidden
from general view behind, for example, trees and hedges, as
this eighteen-well football-pitch-sized pad, in Alberta,
Canada illustrates.
Compared to factories, office buildings or wind turbines,
the visual impact is very low.
Notwithstanding what I have just written, there is
however a way that fluids can theoretically migrate upwards from the
reservoir and cause damage. The well itself can provide such a
pathway unless it is properly designed and constructed according to the
most elementary standards of what is known as well engineering
(declaration: I am a well engineer).
When a well is drilled,
the hole is
“cased”, that is lengths of steel pipe - known as casing - are
screwed together and run into the entire length of the hole, after which
liquid cement is pumped down and up the outside of the casing.
When set, the
cement bonds the casing to the rock, which prevents fluids from
migrating along the outside of the casing. Measurements and tests
are conducted to determine the integrity of the casing and of the bond and
if necessary repairs are carried out. Thus a properly constructed
well will leak fluids neither when they are pumped down the well into
the reservoir rock, nor when fluids emanate upwards out of the reservoir-rock.
However, just as a house from which
an incompetent builder has left out a few roof tiles will leak when it
rains, so a well which is incompetently drilled may also leak under
pressure. The solution to such leaks is not to ban houses or
wells, but to construct them properly, according to basic engineering
norms and to put in place a suitably enforced regulatory regime. Imagine a world where an occasional mistake due to
avoidable incompetence leads to the proscription of all activity in that
field. We would have no technology at all - no aircraft, no
medicines, no cars, no buildings, no internet, no nothing. It is
an absurd proposition.
In fact, none of the criticisms of fraccing stand up to scientific
scrutiny. They mostly boil down to a fear of the unknown and a
special suspicion of oil companies and their motives. The root
cause of this is, of course, the oil companies' own abysmal record of
explaining to the public what they do, how they contribute to global
economic prosperity and development, and their own internal policies on
ethics (this,
for example).
The boom in fraccing activities over the past few years has come about
as a result of a perfect storm:
High oil
prices, seemingly permanently close to $100 a barrel
Advances in
sophisticated technologies, especially
seismic
(for detecting accumulations)
directional, horizontal and multilateral drilling (for accessing
them)
the
fraccing processes themselves (for liberating the hydrocarbons),
Western fear
of excessive energy dependence on hostile foreign states.
The results have
been truly astonishing. Just a few years ago, people were
earnestly wringing their hands about the imminence of so-called
“peak
oil”
and thereafter a global decline in production with catastrophic effects
on human welfare. I
never agreed with these gloomy, ignorant predictions, which is why I
wrote a post in 2005 called
“When
Will the Oil Run Out?”.
Some time later this resulted in a feature article in the Irish Times.
In similar vein, in 2008 I posted another piece,
“Beware
the Peak Oil Salesman”.
My main point was that as the oil price increases,
so
previously uneconomic oil gets liberated by making it economic,
there is a spurt in investment in new technology in order to make more oil more
accessible,
cash becomes available for
further oil exploration and thus discoveries,
every individual and industry is incentivised to conserve energy and
reduce consumption, and
investment
is stimulated into alternative fuel sources such as bio, coal, gas, hydro,
nuclear, solar, tidal, wind, thus taking
some pressure off oil.
In particular, the new availability of massive gas
volumes as a result of fraccing are having a direct moderating effect on
oil prices. This will become ever more apparent as modern
techniques spread for converting gas to easily transportable liquid
products, such as
Shell's new GTL (gas-to-liquid) technology in Qatar.
I remarked that
“oil and gas are found not in the ground but in that unfathomable, inexhaustible
resource that is the human brain”.
And so - yet again - it has proved, thanks (and much to my own personal
surprise) to that veteran technology, fraccing.
For not only has fraccing continued to open up tight -
that is, low-permeability - sandstones and limestones as it always had,
but it is now able to set about shales. Shales are found everywhere
and have long been known as repositories of hydrocarbons, particularly
gas. But they have equally been regarded as far too tight to ever
tackle, unless so close to the surface they can be dug out by open-cast
mining and the rock heated and treated to squeeze out its precious
cargo. Huge deposits measured in billions of barrels are already
being extracted in this tedious way from, among others,
Canadian tar-sands and Venezuelan bitumen.
Modern fraccing techniques have, however, opened up the
deeper shales all
over the world as a whole new hydrocarbon resource comparable in scope to the
massive oil finds of the last century.
For example, the remarkable chart below appears in the December
2011 issue of the Energy Institute's
Petroleum Review, December 2011 (p38). It shows how, thanks to
fraccing, shales and
other tight reservoirs have over the past few years dramatically
reversed what was thought to be the inexorable thirty-year decline in
America's gas reserves (CBM stands for coal bed methane, another newly
exploitable resource).
Reserves will continue to climb, so that the days of
American dependence on foreign energy (notably oil from the Middle East
and Africa) now appear to be numbered. The US currently imports some ten
million barrels a day, which costs a massive trillion dollars every three years.
Drastically
cutting oil imports because of the extra domestic energy liberated by
fraccing has enormously beneficent implications for America and thus the
world,
not just for
the obvious balance of payment issues,
but also for
security of supply
and
especially in terms of reducing the scope for further oil-blackmail
by baleful Islamic oil-producing states.
Moreover, while the numbers may differ, the general
shape of both of the above two charts is similar throughout much of the
developed world. Oil imports have been going up and up for
decades as growth-driven demand has soared while production has
declined. But suddenly fraccing has resulted in new gas and oil which are
dramatically changing the domestic energy picture.
The UK provides a further example. The British
Geological Survey so far
estimates that up to 150 billion cubic metres (5 trillion cubic feet) of
shale gas exist onshore, which is the
equivalent
in calorific terms of some 900 million barrels of oil. This is equal
to 18 months of the UK’s requirements and worth over Ł50 billion (€60
billion) at today’s prices. However, offshore shale gas in British waters,
already prolific in terms of conventional oil and gas, is likely dwarf that
available on land.
We are truly witnessing an international energy
revolution, the likes of which was inconceivable less than a decade ago.
Forget what some people still say about
“peak oil”:
it is and always has been nothing but a Malthusian-style myth.
Since this blog is written in Ireland, I have to end
with the Irish angle on fraccing.
Three companies have expressed an interest in exploring and fraccing
shales for onshore gas –
Tamboran Resources
(Australian),
Lough Allen Natural Gas Company (Irish) and
Enegi Oil (Canadian).
They have their eyes on 8,000 sq km spread over a dozen different
counties. I cannot judge the technical merits of their proposals,
but the few public utterances I have heard (eg
here) have been suffused
with ignorance of the technology, which does not bode well for their
projects.
Nevertheless the issue of fraccing within Ireland is moot.
Professional
objectors have already organised themselves into something called
“No Fracking Ireland”.
It now has
its own
Facebook page and
“clever”
slogans like
“Frack off”
and “Stop
fracking with our water”,
with a little flame to remind us of the fraudulent clip shown above from
the movie Gasland.
No Fracking Ireland has no doubt
been much inspired and encouraged by the successes of the
Shell to Sea
campaign which has for years been trying to stop or stymie Shell's
development of the offshore Corrib gas field, though with exceedingly
sparse scientific basis for its objections. (I
wrote about this in some detail last November). Apart from garnering
international attention, the major achievement of Shell to Sea has been to treble the
costs and the delivery time of the project.
This has not only delayed Ireland's energy independence but guaranteed
that there will be no profits to tax for a very long time.
But perhaps Shell to Sea's principle accomplishment is
to turn Ireland into a pariah state as far as oil and gas investment is
concerned. It will be a generation before the travails of
Corrib will have been forgotten. Meanwhile, with Ireland's
political risk in the order of 200-300% thanks to Corrib, any sane investor is far
likelier to look to less politically costly environments, such as Iraq
or Somalia or other hotspots, to sink their wells.
Thus, you can be sure that whatever they may say in
public, Tamboran and its colleagues will in fact never carry out any
fraccing in the foreseeable future. No Fracking Ireland will
probably claim credit for this, but it properly belongs to Shell to Sea.
Meantime however, the rest of the developed (and less
developed) world will continue to ride the crazy fraccing horse to
energy independence and prosperity, leaving indebted Ireland behind.
The following relevant postings may
be of interest:
Technocratic, unelected governments are the ideal Online comment
an Irish Times article +
“I have come to believe
technocratic, unelected governments are the ideal.” +
“The purpose of politics [is]
to make a reality of equality or substantive
equality – equality of outcomes.” Vintage Vincent!
Vintage socialism! Keep the Red Flag flying high.
The people must not be trusted. Everyone must have
an equal outcome regardless of effort or ability or
entrepreneurship. No-one is entitled to his own
property if it is more than someone else's ...
Charities need regulation to maintain public's trust Online comment
on an Irish Times article No-one has a clue, really, about how well
charities are run. Yes, we know how they collect
money, but how do they spend it? Do they have
procurement policies? Do they acquire goods and
services via open tender that ensure only the lowest
bidders get their business? I have no idea. Their
lack of scrutiny ...
It's a funny old game when it comes to corruption Online comment
on an Irish
Times article The huge discrepancy between wages paid to
players vs referees helps explain the intimidation
of refs by players that you so often see when there
is an unpopular decision. Not only does the ref put
up with it, without for example upgrading from a
yellow card to a red card, but he knows that he - a
cash nobody - will not be supported by the FA ...
Free Speech and BNP Leader Invitation Letter to the Irish Times How ironic and pathetic that
“Trinity Against Fascism”
and its supporters should favour the Fascist ploy of
banning speech they happen to dislike. The world's
oldest (328 years and counting) debating society and
a bastion of free speech, the TCD Philosophical
Society, had invited the British National Party's
Nick Griffin to speak at a debate on immigration
last October. But at the last minute he was banned
because people such as those in TAF don't approve of
what he says ...
Preparing for the budget Letter to the Irish Times Your correspondent Liam O'Mahony of ILP,
presenting some imaginative ways to reduce the
deficit to "€9 billion or €10 billion",
concludes "problem solved". Would that were
so. The Government tells us that the deficit has
been
around €20 billion ...
No escaping fact that rich continue to get richer Online comment
to an Irish Times article by
Vincent Browne Vincent, you perpetually make two heroic assumptions, and this
article is no exception, that it is intrinsically wrong that some people
are extremely wealthy and that "inequality" is intrinsically wrong.
Neither stands up to any dispassionate rational scrutiny. They are
impulses grounded solely on prejudice, emotion and envy, seasoned with
economic zero-sum illiteracy ...
Just try imagining there was no EU Online comment
to an Irish Times article by Fintan O'Toole
Fintan, your analysis of the two undo-able options being mooted is
spot on. But your "solution" boils down to more spending. Yet
spending is what the problem has been all along, as in spending more
than you take in. The only solution, long term, is to stop spending ...
Quote:
“To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the
equivalent of removing every car truck, all-terrain vehicle, tractor,
ambulance, police car and vehicle off every kind of Canadian road.”
Peter Kent, Canada's environment
minister,
announces that Canada is withdrawing from the Kyoto Treaty,
the first country to do so.
Climate change poseurs
notwithstanding,
many more will surely follow.
- - - - - I S R A E L / P A L E S T I N E - - - - -
Quote: “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state - (it was) part
of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who
are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had
the chance to go many places.”
Newt Gringrich, US Republican
Presidential Hopeful,
states the bleedin' obvious and is
excoriated for his trouble.
Quote: “A distinction should be made between traditional
anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which
stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Howard Gutman, President Obama's US
ambassador to Belgium,
shows his own anti-Semitic leanings
by providing excuses for Muslim anti-Semitism.
It is as if he has never even read a
word of the Koran or its Hadiths
and their anti-Jew rhetoric
such as
“The Hour [Judgment Day] will not come
until the Muslims fight the Jews and
until the Jews hide behind the trees and rocks and
the trees and rocks will say, ‘O Muslim, O Servant of God!
Here are the Jews! Come and kill them!’”
- - - - - € U R O - - - - -
Quote:
“There might be some assets worthy of consideration — precious
metals, for example. But other metals would make wise investments, too.
Among them tinned goods and small calibre weapons.”
Warren Buffet's Hathaway investment
vehicle gives its advice
about how to hedge and prepare for a break-up of the €uro
Quote:
“Telling a European that one has to earn
her or his health-care benefits or social insurance
or pension or access to amenities and infrastructure
is equivalent to challenging a brick wall to be
flexible and dynamic.”
Constantin Gurdgiev,
Ireland-based Russian economist
- - - - - T O P G E A R -
- - - -
Quote:
“Frankly, I would have them all shot. I would take them
outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean how dare they go
on strike when they have got these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be
guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?”
Jeremy Clarkson's solution to strikes by public “servants” in
the UK.
Unfortunately he later (sort-of)
apologised for his joke.
Apparently a joke which offends people is not a joke.
[Of course a joke which offends no-one
is never funny.]
Coincidentally, sales of Mr Clarkson's
latest DVD,
“Powered
Up”,
soared.
Ireland's Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, makes
a truly profound observation
in his first-ever State of the Nation address.
Indeed, it was only the sixth such
speech since the foundation of the state,
the last one being
25 long years ago by a criminal predecessor.
Quote:
“Connemara ..., as it is open to the Atlantic, [and] in
terms of cloud computing, we have dense thick fog for nine months of the
year, because of the mountain heights and the ability to harness this cloud
power, there is tremendous scope for cloud computing to become a major
employer in this region ... the Government should be doing more to harness
clean industries for the Connemara area ... wind energy and cloud computing
are two obvious examples.”
Connemara councillor Seamus O Scanail, Independent, sets
out his vision
for the regeneration of his windswept constituency.
Fellow councillor Martin Shiels remarked that
“you must be a fecking eejit to think that
cloud computing had anything to do with climate”.
Late note (20 Jan
2012): Sadly this story turns out to be a
hoax. Hat-tip:
Mark Humphrys
Protests –
overwhelmingly unfounded and politically unchallenged –
have trebled the cost of developing Ireland’s offshore Corrib gasfield.
This huge “political risk” will deter
further such investments for a generation.
Many years ago, in the
late 1970s and
early 1980s, there was a Dutch company
with an Irish name, Shell Teoranta BV, whose
raison d’ętre was to seek and hopefully find oil offshore Ireland (“Teoranta”
is Irish for "“Limited”). It
drilled a number of wells – for example, on
19th December 1979, the Irish Times featured a photo of a jack-up rig drilling an exploration well just
offshore Dublin – but to no avail. All the holes were dry.
Concluding that Ireland was a lost cause, Shell Teoranta packed its bags and
shut up shop, though not before claiming a huge write-off from the Dutch
taxpayer for all its futile Irish expenditure, a provision of Netherlands
law which explains why Shell Teoranta was registered there. Shell reckoned
it had better uses for its shareholders' money than to fritter it away on
the ultra-long-shots of Irish exploration.
Fast forward a few
decades and Enterprise Oil, a significant independent British oil company
though not in the same league as the majors, disproved Shell's pessimism by
discovering, in 1996, a small-to-medium sized gas field offshore Mayo, which
it called Corrib. Containing natural gas reserves eventually
calculated to be around
one TCF, ie a trillion cubic feet (equivalent
to the energy of about 170 million barrels of oil), it lay 3,000 metres
below the seabed in waters 350 metres deep some 83km off the north west
coast of Ireland. Notwithstanding that weather and sea conditions are
among Europe's wildest, and that Ireland possesses the barest of offshore
oilfield infrastructure, the economics were nevertheless positive – albeit
marginally so – thanks largely to the improved (from the oil industry’s
standpoint) contract terms promulgated
in 1987 by Energy Minister Ray Burke.
Enterprise Oil had never
before attempted such a demanding project. Yet in the year 2000 it
decided to go ahead with bringing Corrib’s hydrocarbons ashore anyway,
quickly busying itself with organizing finance, drawing up engineering plans
and ordering equipment. Yet its inexperience manifested itself early
on and remained long undetected when it failed to discuss in any detail its
plans with the local people, listen to their concerns and secure their
enthusiastic support. This is an elementary but vital step in the
project process that the international oil industry has learnt the hard way
over many decades.
The
world-wide eruption of protests in 1995 at Shell's environmentally sound
decision to sink the North Sea platform
Brent Spar in the far Atlantic was one of that company's bitterest
lessons. This reputational catastrophe showed in starkest terms that it
was no
longer sufficient for the industry to be right; it must convince those who
might be affected (even if only emotionally) by its plans that it is right.
Even Greenpeace eventually acknowledged that Shell's original plan would
have had minimal ecological impact – Brent Spar had been comprehensively
voided of all toxic material and there is anyway little life on the Atlantic
seabed at a depth of 2˝ kilometers. Shell realised that its prior
philosophy of “Trust me” must be replaced by one of “Show me”.
Enterprise Oil's failure to ensure that the locals were onside over the
Corrib development was a mistake with enormous long term implications, as
anyone with but a passing interest in the activist
Shell-to-Sea organization will be aware.
In April
2002, Shell, chastened no doubt by the voracious acquisition of the US oil
companies Arco and Amoco in recent years by its arch-rival BP, splashed out
Ł3.5 billion to buy Enterprise Oil, whose portfolio of assets fitted
rather well with Shell's.
But like
someone sitting down to a lunch of two dozen luscious
Gillardeau oysters, the world’s
most expensive, only to discover a bad 'un among them, Shell found
itself responsible for delivering a demanding major offshore development
project in Ireland, by no means a blockbuster, in the country it had with
good reason foresworn twenty years earlier. Oh, and its return to Ireland
meant it had to refund Shell Teoranta's juicy rebate from the 1980s back to
the Dutch taxpayer.
Nevertheless, Shell in
good faith put together a team, including some Enterprise personnel, to take
over the Corrib project. Drawing on its extensive experience and
expertise in this type of deep water harsh environment, it
reviewed the Enterprise plans and in 2003 agreed a budget of €800,000 and
four years. First gas, as it is known, was expected in 2007.
In outline, the plan was
to drill a number of additional wells
offshore,
to produce gas from them through “Christmas
Trees” (the set of control valves at the top of every well) to be
located on the seabed,
to direct the gas from the Christmas
Trees into a central manifold also on the sea floor,
and thence via a 20-inch diameter
submarine pipeline the 83km to shore.
In this little-developed,
sparsely-populated rural part of County Mayo near the tiny village of
Ballinaboy,
the gas would be carried by a nine
kilometres onshore pipeline, also of 20 inch diameter,
to where a gas plant would be built.
This plant would separate the pipeline
content into
dry, clean gas, to be sold to Bord
Gais, the state gas company for
distribution to retail and commercial consumers,
condensate (a valuable
gasoline-like liquid petroleum which is always found dissolved in
natural gas), which would be trucked to a refinery in Cork,
water, which after scrupulous
purification would be pumped into the sea,
and other waste and recyclable
products to be disposed of safely.
An umbilical cable would run parallel
to the pipeline to provide controls to the distant subsea
installations.
Among the necessary legislative consents
and authorizations already in place by then were
consent to construct the Corrib gas
pipeline (83 km offshore plus 9 km onshore)
Authorisation under the Continental
Shelf Act
Approval for the Plan for Development
Foreshore licence for the pipeline,
umbilical and outfall pipe
So all
was looking rosy. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot as it
turned out. None of it technical or financial or labour-related, the
classical reasons most big projects run into trouble.
Shell's
first error was not to realise that there was a potential problem with the
residents in the Ballinaboy area of County Mayo where the onshore pipeline
was to be laid and the gas plant built. Understandably, families were
initially fearful that gas explosions might destroy their houses or even
kill them. They strongly preferred that the gas plant be located offshore
(out of sight out of mind).
Enterprise Oil had done very little to explain to the residents not only the
project, its robust safeguards and the virtual impossibility of the disaster
scenarios they imagined, but also the benefits it was likely to bring to
that relatively impoverished area in terms of employment, regeneration and
reputation.
On the issue of explosion, designing an
onshore pipeline is one of the easiest tasks an oil and gas engineer faces.
The pressure and chemical content of
the contents are accurately known,
steels can be selected according to
their precisely known strength, flexibility and composition,
the circular cross-section of a pipe
is the simplest of geometries for accurately calculating the stresses,
hence leading to appropriate selection of steel, diameter and wall
thickness,
specially designed inhibitors can be
pumped to neutralise internal chemical attack,
regular internal inspections with
advanced tools can confirm the ongoing integrity of the pipeline through
its lifetime.
Thus a
properly designed, operated and maintained pipeline simply will not fail,
and speculation about failure is pointless.
Though
the onshore pipeline was (initially) to run within 70 metres of some homes,
as for the plant itself, it was sufficiently remote from residents'
buildings for them to be unaffected even in the highly unlikely event of a
disaster.
But by
the time, Shell recognised it had a problem with the locals, that problem
had transformed from a rational fear to an emotional fury. With the fury
came press attention, with that came international interest, with that
Corrib became a cause célčbre, and an opportunity for professional objectors
everywhere to vent their manufactured spleen at a wicked multinational oil
company whose only desire is to destroy the lives of simple natives.
Inevitably, Shell's past “sins”
were thrown into the pot, notably
the attempted disposal of Brent Spar
into the Atlantic ocean (the falsity of the issue was of no interest),
cavalier oil pollution in Nigeria
(usually caused by sabotage either to steal product or by landowners
hoping for higher compensation than growing crops would yield), and
especially the execution of Ken
Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues supposedly at Shell's instigation because
they were objecting to its activities. (Actually, they were convicted in
a Nigerian court of law of inciting the murder of four village elders;
Shell had no hand or part in it and indeed lobbied vociferously for
clemency).
The
professional objectors have on several occasions been joined by overseas
protestors, including the son of Mr Saro-Wiwa. And with the inauguration in
November of the left-wing Michael D Higgins as Ireland’s new president, the
objectors now number
the First Citizen among their supporters. Though some funds are raised
via
websites, it is unclear who provides the bulk of its funding, but Sinn
Fein and other sinister sources have been cited. I have asked the major
anti-Corrib pressure group “Shell
to Sea” where it gets its money and am still awaiting a reply.
Meanwhile, from the moment Shell got involved with Corrib until the present,
it has been on the back foot in trying present its side of the story to the
world while simultaneously progressing the project.
I first wrote about
these objections, in some detail, almost two years ago, in a piece
titled
“Organizational
Dementia”.
The
project itself has been exemplary in its technical aspects, and indeed in
many ways is an industry trailblazer. Shell, and particularly Ireland,
should be in the position of bragging to the world of its prowess. Ireland
should be using the success of Corrib as a means to attract not just future
investment in offshore (and indeed onshore) exploration and production, but
also the vast, highly technical contract industry that supports such
activities.
Instead,
the project is conducted almost behind closed doors and talked about in
whispers, in the shadow of continuous low-level but toxic protest, for fear
of unleashing another round of hysterical tabloid agitation. Earlier this
year, a private, low-key purely technical presentation about the project to
a select group of about fifty interested engineers had to be cancelled when
Shell-to-Sea got wind and threatened to disrupt the meeting and call in the
media.
For
Shell, all these difficulties has pushed up the price tag from €800m to €2.5
billion. But the nation is also paying a terrible cost that, both now and
in the future, that no country can afford in these times of
financial crisis and meltdown.
It is
instructive to compare Corrib with other recent major offshore development
projects. One such is Norway’s
Ormen Lange, in which Shell holds 17% and recently took over the running
of the field:
Offshore Gas Field
Corrib
Ormen Lange
Country
Ireland
Norway
Discovered
1996
1997
Gas reserves
One TCF
Ten TCF
Reservoir depth
3,000 metres
3,000 metres
Water depth
350 metres
800-1,200 metres
Distance from shore
83 km
140 km
Subsea wells
Four
24
Subsea manifolds
One
Two
Subsea pipeline
One, 20”, 83 km
Two, 30”, 140 km
Onshore processing plant
One
One
Approval granted
2003
April 2004
First gas planned
2007
2007
First Gas delivered
2015 (est)
October 2007
Original budget
€0.8 billion
$12 billion
Delivery cost
€2.5 billion (est)
$12 billion
So Ormen
Lange, by any measure a bigger more complex project even than Corrib, was
delivered on budget in just 3˝ years. Corrib, on the other hand, is
expected to take twelve years - three times as long as originally planned –
and to cost three times its original budget.
Have a
look at another major construction project in an entirely different industry
– aircraft construction. Boeing dreamt up its 787 Dreamliner in
January 2003 and eventually delivered it in October 2011. This was
3˝ years behind schedule, a big overrun, which was solely due to
technical problems, apart from a
two-month Boeing Machinists Strike.
Corrib’s
far greater delay, by comparison, is due not to technical problems at all,
nor financial ones nor labour ones. Local politics, and the way they were
handled, are entirely to blame. How embarrassing is that?
The local politics boil down purely to
those objections by local people, and their national and international
supporters, to the onshore elements of the project, objections with only the
thinnest veneer of legitimacy to start with, and none at all following
substantial concessions instituted by Shell, principally
twice re-routing of the onshore
pipeline to shift its closest point to people’s homes
from 70 metres to 234m and within – incredibly – a tunnel.
The 4.2m diameter tunnel,
stretching
4.9km beneath Sruwaddaton Bay making it Ireland's longest, will
have added
some €400m and two years to project delivery.
Meanwhile, for the past eight years the politicians have steadfastly looked
on with, at best, bemused disinterest and without the slightest concern for
Ireland’s industrial reputation. Moreover, enforcement of the law has been
low on their priorities and many (including the current president) have overtly supported the activists.
So view
Corrib from the standpoint of outside investors. A major, innovative
project that has encountered no substantive problems in terms of technology,
finance or industrial relations, is nevertheless delivered three times over
budget and over time, due entirely to local impediments and the complete
lack of political will to overcome them.
People
will look at Ireland, and surely assign it a massive political risk of 200%
to 300%.
The
Corrib experience is such that there will undoubtedly be no further major
investments of this nature in Ireland for at least a generation until this
one has been forgotten. Even industrial investors in other heavy industries
will be looking askance at Ireland and asking themselves if the favourable
corporate tax rate of 12˝% is really worth the enormous cost of all the
political hassle it can expect from local objectors and the spinelessness of
politicians.
Far
better to sink your money in havens such as Somalia and Iraq where the
political risk will be much less punitive than in the erstwhile Celtic Tiger.
Ireland's chance to
showpiece its technical expertise and perhaps secure for itself a permanent
corner of the massive, lucrative and long-lasting offshore market for the
future is gone.
Meanwhile, Shell is licking its wounds and battling on. Eventually,
once gas finally begins to flow in 2015 (?) it will
get its money back, but it will be a long long slog.
Declaration of interest:
I worked for Shell for thirty years, though not through the Corrib period
Late Note:
This post was re-published, with my permission,
by
Royal Dutch Shell plc .com, a site that mainly tries to catch Shell out.
Creditor banks, by failing to
discount debts
they know will never be repaid in full,
are guilty of criminal deception
that in other industries is severely punished
In the mid-Noughties, Shell was
convulsed by a major, almost existential crisis, which, unlike
those of a decade earlier, was of an entirely non-technical
non-environmental nature.
In 2004, Shell confessed that for
several years it had been exaggerating its oil reserves by a
whopping
3.9 billion barrels, or 20%. A company's oil reserve statement
is its best estimate of how much future oil it is able to produce based
on current technology, current oil prices and current legislation; the
more it has the richer it is. Shell's overstated reserves meant
overstated future profits and thus an overstated share price, which
promptly crashed
wiping out Ł3 billion of investors' savings
As a result, Shell had to
pay, inter alia, a $381 million settlement to shareholders, a $120m
fine to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a
Ł17m fine to Britain's Financial Services Authority. Phil
Watts the CEO was fired, retired to his secluded mansion in the south of
England and dare not ever visit the USA for fear of imprisonment.
In other words, the penalties when a private commercial
company deceives the markets as to its wealth are very severe.
Which brings us to the EU's banking crisis. The
PIGIS of €uroland, soon to become the BIPIGS (Belgium,
Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain), are facing economic ruin
because they each have debts so great that no-one in his/her heart
believes they can ever be repaid in full. But if all (or even
some) of the BIPIGS default, the €uro will come crashing down and the EU
itself will probably split asunder. That is why the EU, aided by
the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have been
“bailing out” stricken countries as their debts fall due, in
exchange for severe austerity to bring national budgets back into
balance (eventually).
But the term is a misnomer.
If I am in a sinking boat and someone bails me out, it means he scoops
out water and throws it out of the boat. The EU/ECB/IMF troika is
doing no such thing. Under intense pressure from Germany and
France in particular, it is lending money to allow countries like
Ireland to pay their debts, but of course those countries still owe the
money, just to the troika instead of to the original creditors. In
other words, water is being
“bailed out”
of the prow of the boat and transferred to the aft; it's still sinking
just as fast.
What is actually getting
“bailed-out” is of course the BIPIGS' creditors - those banks and
institutions so intrinsically stupid that they lent billions to equally
stupid countries like Ireland who were always incapable of repayment.
And who are those creditors? Overwhelmingly, they are German and French
financial institutions. They are so exposed to the BIPIGS that
should they default, the whole Franco-German banking system is in danger
of collapse. If that weren't enough, beyond Europe, German banks
are also
holding up to a hundred billion dollars (some say
a trillion dollars) of American sub-prime mortgages, whose utter
junkness triggered the current financial tsunami in 2008.
But the question to ask is this.
Why are these banks carrying these debts on their books at full their
value when it is quite obvious that they should be written down to a
figure that reflects the very real risk that their creditors will
default partially if not totally?
On 27th October, the EU granted
Greece a 50% write-down of its sovereign debts from
€200 billion to €100 bn.
On 5th November, Ireland repaid in
full (for reasons few understand) €713 billion of debt to unsecured
bondholders, yet so unexpected was this bonanza that only a few months
ago this debt was trading at a mere
half of its face value.
These are just two examples of why
the German, French and other bondholding banks and institutions should
already have written down the value of their loan books by something in
the order of 50%. But they haven't because this would make them
look bad and devastate their own share prices.
Yet what, exactly, is the
qualitative difference between
Shell overstating its oil reserves by 20%,
hence exaggerating its intrinsic worth, and
banks overstating their loan books by up to a
hundred percent, hence exaggerating their intrinsic worth?
I would say there is no difference.
Yet Shell (rightly) gets fined hundreds of millions and its CEO, in
order to escape an American jail, has effectively to go into semi-hiding
for life.
This gets to the heart of the
rottenness of the EU's banking system and the EUrocratic élite who are
conspiring to conceal what is in effect a criminal enterprise of
deception. Right now, the German and French banks are in deep
trouble because they have nothing like the wealth they are pretending to
have.
The Greek government, in order to be accepted into the €uro
in the early 2000s,
deliberately lied that its deficit was under the required 3% when
the true figure was a staggering
15.4%.
Likewise the Franco-German banks are now deliberately lying about the
health of their balance sheets by wilfully applying no discounts to
their loans.
And so are the German and French governments, as
egged on by Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy,
“Merkozy”
as they are jointly nicknamed.
Last year, John Lanchester
published an acclaimed book called
“Whoops!
Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay”. The sooner
Merkozy get their arrogant heads around this notion the sooner some kind of
solution, involving mass default followed by mass rebuilding, can occur.
The more they kick the can down the road with their lies, the bigger the
can is getting and the more painful the inevitable outcome will be.
A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
'Tis like the writing on the wall.
But he is wrong, for his verse assumes the bonds will be
repaid. But as Mr Lanchester explains, today's mega-giga-bonds
will largely not be repaid. As such it is the debtors (which
includes the BIPIGS) who have the soul of the Merkozy creditors and
their ilk, not the other way round.
Putting off the evil day, whether it is through shying
away from default or criminally falsifying the balance sheets of
creditor institutions, is only making the ultimate day of reckoning far
worse.
Late note (13th November):
Behind its paywall, the Sunday Times
reports that Italy's new prime minister Mario Monti says that
“growth should come not through further recourse to debt but
through removal of the obstacles that have acted as brakes on our growth”.
Taoiseach
Enda Kenny (18.2
billion €uro on various hare-brained schemes).
Interestingly not one of these
esteemed gentleman has ever, in fact, created a single job in his life.
Oh he will tell you about this initiative and that tax concession and
the other festival he arranged, which resulted in thousands of new jobs.
But in every case he has (a) used other people's money to do what he
wanted to do and (b) never met a single payroll himself. The jobs
have actually been created by businessmen risking their own cash.
The other interesting point is that
among the entire political class across the world there is a conviction
that it can only create jobs by spending money - money that of course
belongs to other people (known as taxpayers). That's why they
prefer to talk about
“investing”, as this is a more upbeat-sounding euphemism
which suggests there might one day be an economic return (ha!).
But if these revered Statesmen were to talk to a few
actual, you know, businessmen who actually do, you know, create jobs,
the scales might fall from their eyes. Because any businessman
will tell you that the single biggest obstacle to job creation is the
series of roadblocks thrown in his/her path by the State itself.
Remove the roadblocks and the jobs
will simply follow, just as traffic flows smoothly once you take away
the barriers. And the beauty of this is that it costs
no money to take stuff away. Yes, job creation is - or can and should be -
all gain and no pain. Let me count the ways, or at least some of
them.
Eliminate the minimum wage.
If an employer offers a lower wage which a
worker is willing to accept, it is preposterous and immoral that
the State should prevent such an agreement. It thereby
denies the worker a job and the employer the chance to grow his
business.
Moreover, the MW not only prevents the
creation of lower-wage lower-skilled jobs, but it also is the
marker against which higher wages are pegged. In other
words, if a labourer receives the minimum wage, a skilled
tradesman receives a multiple of this. In this way,
the MW also impedes the hiring of artisans who are willing to
work for lower than the specified multiple of the MW.
Eliminate employers' job taxes on new jobs.
This is so obvious it is hardly worth
stating. But taxes that an employer has to pay, which
amount to a tax on each job he/she creates, are a direct
disincentive to that creation. Such taxes include, in the
USA, Social Security and Medicare taxes, Federal unemployment
taxes (which in fairness Mr Obama is already
trying to cut). In Ireland it's Pay Related Social
Insurance. In the UK its a National Insurance
Contribution.
The employer is being punished for
providing a job.
The loss of revenue from eliminating
employers' job taxes will quickly be recouped by income tax and
the non-claiming of benefits on the part of the employee.
Eliminate regulations on firing (other than for
bigotry reasons)
Cruel as it sounds, by making it easy to
fire people, you make it easy to hire them.
It is the fear of being stuck with
employees beyond when you need them (whether for business or
performance reasons) that is a real deterrent to job creation.
What employers want quite reasonably to do
is to hire when business is good and lay off when it is poor,
and to get rid of employees who are not pulling their weight.
It's the very reason why many employers prefer to use
contractors
for much of their activity.
Slash regulations that prevent people from
working longer hours if they and their employers so agree,
in particular the EU's
Working Time Directive which restricts work to 8 hours per
day, 48 hours per week, 48 weeks per year.
Eliminate tax loopholes
These are the State's way of deciding who
are going to be winners and then backing them. But if
there is one body that is entirely incapable of identifying
future winners it is surely the State. Moreover, the tax
foregone through loopholes must instead be gathered from other
businesses that the State chooses to so punish.
The system is effectively arbitrary.
By levelling the playing field through eliminating tax
loopholes, the most efficient enterprises will succeed, grow and
hire more staff.
Cut welfare to levels that do not compete with
paid employment.
In Ireland, a family could draw down
€90,000 pa in welfare payments depending on its size and on
whether it met the various eligibility criteria. To take
in
this much net after tax would require a gross of over a hundred grand.
Someone drawing benefits is most unlikely to earn anything like
such a figure.
This is an extreme example but highlights
the over generosity of welfare payments, allowances and perks in
many Western countries.
It is ridiculous that the State's largesse
(on the backs of taxpayers)
effectively prevents large numbers of people from taking up
jobs. No-one drawing
welfare benefits should end up better off than those who fund
them through their work and taxes.
Will any of this simple shopping
list happen? Maybe bits of
it here and there.
But there is an inherent problem with governing
a country, whether through dictatorship or democracy. The
governing class believes its function is to make new laws
and to perpetuate itself. What
candidate campaigns with the slogan
“Strike Down Laws”. Yet where is
the logic in continually creating new legislation, ad infinitum?
Surely it is much more rational first to eliminate or reduce or simplify
laws that no longer make sense, and to make new ones only in extremis?
Surely each administration should seek to leave office with fewer
statutes on the books than it encountered.
But it never does. Its instinct is always to do
more and to do that it always thinks it has to spend more.
Creating jobs by doing less? Just removing
barriers and getting the hell out of the way? Letting free workers
and free employers make deals together without interference?
Perish the thought.
That is why ever more hard-working taxpayers' money will
be frittered away on
“job-creation” wheezes. Yet new jobs will emerge,
but only in spite of, not because of, such blundering
“assistance”
from Governments throughout the Western world.
Notes not the answer [P!] Letter
published in the Sunday Times Matt Cooper writes "the EU must dismiss fears of
inflation and follow the example of Britain and America by printing more
money". What has he been taking? Inflation is the inevitable
result of printing more money, because it automatically devalues
existing money, thus ...
Race for the Áras Letter to the Irish Times Bernadette Edgeworth lists six reasons why Sean Gallagher
“has none of the qualities necessary to become the president
of this country”
(Letters,
Oct 25th, see right). As distinct from ... 1. A participant, actually a
leader, in a real, dirty war; 2. A member, actually a leader, of a
terrorist organization that ...
Quote: “Libyan laws in future will have Sharia, the Islamic code, as
its ‘basic source’
... Libya's ban on polygamy will be lifted ... in future bank regulations
will ban the charging of interest, in line with Sharia”.
Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of Libya's National
Transitional Council
and de facto president makes plain at the earliest opportunity
that post-Q'Daffy Libya will be a Sharia state.
Is this what it was all for?
Quote:
“I've come to know Saif [Q'Daffy, son of Moammar] as
someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values as the
core of his inspiration.”
David Held, professor of political science
at the London School of Economics,
waxes lyrical in May 2010 as he introduces Q'Daffy Junior
to give the annual Ralph Miliband memorial lecture,
in honour of the late father of the David and Ed Miliband,
the latter being the leader of Britain's Labour party
and a great pal of the professor.
Prof Held it was who also accepted a Ł1.5m donation from
Q'Daffy Jr
to the LSE's Global Governance research centre.
Prof Held hurriedly resigned in October 2011 just before before
a report on the university's cosy relationship
with the Libyan dictatorship was published.
Meanwhile, Q'Daffy Jr remains on the run,
in fear of his life from anti-Q'Daffy Libyans and
in fear of his liberty from an
indictment for crimes against humanity
by the International Criminal Court.
- - - - - U S P R E S I D E N C Y - - - - -
Quote: “The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that
if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008 [to get me re-elected],
then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people,
‘you are on your own’.”
President Obama frightens the horses by horrifying them
with the notion
that a Republican presidency would
herald
a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.
Imagine such an abysmal scenario:
free-born American citizens being responsible for themselves,
instead of leaving that to a nanny Federal government.
Quote: “I have never sexually harassed anyone. Yes, I was
falsely accused while I was at the National Restaurant Association ... When
there are facts, bring them to me, let me face my accusers.”
Oh-oh. Herman Cain, the
Republican's new, charismatic,
black presidential aspirant issues a (somewhat weak) denial
to accusations that he sexually harassed two women in the 1990s,
to whom he made a cash settlement.
This could well mark the end of his bid.
- - - - - I S R A E L - - - - -
Quote:
“I can't stand him [Benyamin Netanyahu] anymore,
he's a liar.”
President
Sarkozy moans to President Obama about the leader of a mutual ally.
“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every
day”,
responds an ever sympathetic Mr Obama.
Why doesn't someone just rid the world
of that turbulent Zionist entity?
What's that? Ahmedinijad is doing his best?
- - - - - I T A L Y - - - - -
Quote:
“I don't know if it was me inside. Yes, it's true it is my
car and the registration number is mine but I really don't want to say
anything else. All I will say is that there is nothing to be ashamed about.
Anyway who said that I stayed the night? I'm not making any other comment.
So they say my car left at 10am in the morning? People just jump to
conclusions. Maybe I left at 3am and came back at 9am - who knows? Whenever
I am invited I go.”
Beautiful brunette Francesca Pascale, 25,
a regional councillor
in Uncle Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party in Naples,
“explains”
her nocturnal activities.
Late on the night of desperate negotiations to keep his job
as prime minister,
his girlfriend drove her Smart car into Palazzo Grazioli, his Rome
residence,
getting a wink from the guard. The car did not leave till next morning.
Now that the competition is over, with the All Blacks the
worthy champions, I can admit that there is an even better score-tallying
website, run by a car rental company of all things. Click
here.
On 18th October 2011, Israeli Sergeant Gilad
Shalit, 25, after 5˝ years of captivity by Hamas, is freed at last, in
exchange for over a thousand Palestinian convicts in Israeli jails. He looks
tired and dazed, but otherwise healthy, as he replies to questions from an
Egyptian TV reporter.
However,
Melanie Philips
observes that off camera behind Sgt Shalit was a “man in fatigues
and wearing a black face mask and the green headband of the Qassam
brigades – Hamas’s military wing – and with a video camera in his hand”,
with his other hand resting on the back of Sgt Shalit's chair. The frail
young man was clearly being intimidated.
Nothing is as it seems in that benighted part of the world.
Meanwhile,
in exchange, the Israelis released 1,037 prisoners, nearly all
Palestinians and other Arabs, many of them unrepentant multi-murderers.
Little good can surely ensue.
The most unpopular man in a gay marriage university
debate
Trinity College Dublin's Philosophical Society is one
of the world's most prestigious student debating fora, and regularly invites
celebrity guests to speak.
“The Phil” as
it is colloquially known was founded in 1683 as a
paper-reading society for the “discourse of philosophy, mathematics, and
other polite literature”.
It is said to be the world's oldest debating society and is currently on its
327th annual session. Its
patrons,
disreputable and otherwise, include
politician Bertie Ahern (d),
historian Niall Fergusson (o),
UN nuclear diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei (d),
US Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (o).
Three years ago I (distinctly not a celebrity) was
invited to speak at a debate about drugs legalisation, which I reported on
here.
Last week, they had me back again to speak against the
motion “This House Believes Civil Partnerships are Sexual Apartheid”.
It's apparently not easy to find someone prepared to make himself unpopular
by rejecting the social conformities of the day. But if you need
someone to speak against gay marriage, against global warming, pro-Israel,
against Obama, I seem to be your man!
My fellow speakers, all but one of whom spoke with
great verve and oratory, were:
For the motion:
Peter Tatchell,
for decades a vociferous gay-rights activist, who once attempted to make
a
citizen's arrest on Zimbabwe's illegitimate president Robert Mugabe
in London for crimes against human rights, and was beaten up by Mugabe's
goons for his trouble. Mr Tatchell was one of two celebrity guests
and argued that gays should be allowed to marry, and that heteros should
be allowed to enter into civil partnerhips. Weird.
Anne McCarthy, a solicitor and
LGBT Noise organiser
from Limerick, considered opponents to gay marriage to be like anti-miscegenationists
from Alabama of the 1950s and decried
David Quinn as one of them.
Max Krzyzanowski (Irish but of Polish extraction)
was the other celebrity guest, who in 2009 was crowned the first ever
Mr Gay World defeating 19 other younger contestants. He had
scoured this website and in particular my page
tinyurl.ie/oq in
order to counter some of my evidence.
Student David Doyle who pointed out that that in
Ireland there are 169 legal differences between Civil Partnership and
Marriage. He also complained that a married person who wishes to
change his/her sex must first divorce before the new sex will be
officially recognized. He was outraged by these pernicious
inequalities.
Against the motion:
Professor Ray Kinsella of UCD's Quinn School of Business, a
scientist who is an expert on financial institutions, insurance and
corporate governance, and bears an alarming likeness to Henry Kissinger.
The main thrust of his low-key speech was that marriage is as defined in
the Christian Bible and Jewish Torah and this trumps everything else.
Owen Murphy and Jamie Donnelly were student members
on, apparently, my side. But each of
them decried marriage itself and more or less made arguments favouring
the Proposition rather than the Opposition. What allies!
Me. I was the only person who
tried to present rational arguments in opposition to the motion (see
below). This made it a kind-of six against one contest with one
abstention, but I'm not whingeing. It was fun.
Anyway, I showed up, was treated to an excellent dinner
with Guinness and wine and presented my speech in front of an audience of
about 300 attending the debate. I was, inevitably, labelled by other
speakers (especially Mr Gay World 2009)
“dishonourable”, “homophobic”, “dishonest”, “a bigot”
and other colourful epithets I don't remember, and all without a shred of
evidence. I also elicited the evening's biggest cry of “Shame!”,
of which I am rather proud.
So I must have been saying something right.
Moreover, I was delighted to see that the spirit and practice of free speech
is so alive and robust at The Phil.
(Incidentally, I have
argued elsewhere that the Left often has to resort to fancy
name-calling and lots of noise because their arguments are usually so
thin that demolition of their opponents' case purely through logic
doesn't work very well.)
Following the debate itself, the evening proceeded with three successive
drinking sessions and notwithstanding the earlier fireworks we all became
best of friends. It ended with a cohort walking to a nearby night club
called Prhomo (which
is a sponsor of The Phil) until
the early hours; I thoroughly enjoyed my first trip to a gay bar, not least
because the beer was only €3 a pint (compared with €4-6 elsewhere).
Here is my speech. You can make up your own mind as to how
“dishonourable”, “homophobic”, “dishonest” and “bigoted”
it is.
“This House Believes Civil Partnerships are Sexual Apartheid”
Mr President,
Members of the Council, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting me here tonight.
Last month, a
Brazilian Congressman called Jair
Bolsonaro caused outrage among ordinary decent Brazilians when he
declared that“I'd
rather have a dead son than a gay son”. This so outraged many
heartbroken Brazilian parents who had lost sons and daughters simply for
the sin of being born gay that they set up an organization
called the “Equality Moms”, which is campaigning to end violence,
prejudice and discrimination against LGBTs, objectives I would
wholeheartedly endorse.
If I were a Mom I would therefore
be delighted to support such an organization, were it not for that
pernicious word “Equality”. “Equality”, like “fairness”
is one of those modern, feel-good epithets that totally deny the world
in which we and all living things exist. For if nature were signed up
to the “equality” agenda, it would have provided me with the
ovaries that so many of you happily possess, and I could indeed have
become a Mom.
“Equality”, or some
interpretation that has no bearing on the word, is I think at the heart
of today’s motion, “This House Believes Civil Partnerships are
Sexual Apartheid”.
“Apartheid” is another word
co-opted so as to pretend it means something entirely different from
what it actually does. The Afrikaaners did this first when they took
the original, neutral, Dutch world for “Separateness” or “Apartness”
and made it decidedly unneutral by instituting a barbaric regime of
systematic oppression and domination by Whites over people they
classified as Blacks and Coloureds, enforced by segregation,
suppression, harassment, brutality, imprisonment and often death. Yet
now some of the wilder elements among gay marriage proponents are using
the word “Apartheid” to imply that LBGTs are being subjected to
similar savagery. This is preposterous, adolescent and an insult to
those black and mixed-race human beings who were genuinely crushed under
Apartheid’s vicious jackboot.
The gross misuse of the word “Apartheid”
is alone sufficient to dismiss this evening’s motion as ridiculous. But
there is more.
Let me return to “Equality”.
Outside the realm of mathematics, it is, like beauty, a word that exists
only in the eye of the beholder (or beer-holder as some wit once
observed). It has no absolute value.
If my salary is 20% less than
yours, that is not equal.
Unless I work 20% less than you, then it IS equal.
Or my work produces only half the widgets
that you produce
in which case our salaries are unequal because even
with
20% less salary I am clearly overpaid.
All humans may be equal in
the eyes of God, or Bhudda or Gaia. But in human eyes is a person with
testicles equal to a person with a womb? I dunno. It’s a meaningless
question; remember that we are all different, each of us is unique –
just like everyone else.
The argument is often advanced
that to deny marriage to two people of the same sex is contrary to
Equality. But of course it’s not. They are as free as anyone else to
marry, to marry someone of the opposite sex; no-one is preventing them
from marrying. Their marital opportunities are the equal of those of
heterosexuals. Unless, as a beer-holder your view of “equality”
differs – is not the equal of mine as it were.
Of course the modern argument is
that “marriage” no longer means a union between a man and a
woman, as it has for thousands of years. It just means a union. But
there we go again, trying to make words mean what they patently do not
mean. But nevertheless, let’s explore some ramifications.
If the word “marriage” were
to be mutilated to drop the inconvenient one-man-one-woman stricture,
there would be no reason to stop there. If one-man-one-man becomes OK,
then why not
polygamy and polyandry,
or three women,
or a man and five camels,
or indeed 33-year-old Amy Wolfe and her wish
to marry a fairground ride as
The Sun gleefully reported two years ago?
And why must sex be involved? Why
shouldn't
a pair of bridge partners be eligible for the
marital tax breaks,
or 2008’s English spinster sisters
Joyce and Sybil Burden faced with eviction because of
inheritance taxes,
or a man and his sons?
Surely all this would be equality
in action. But of course I am being ridiculous, as is anyone who
wants to pretend marriage means something other than what it does and
that “equality” has some role to play.
That’s why the concept of “Civil
Partnership” or “Civil Union” was invented. And for reasons
never adequately explained by the legislators, it has recently become
law in this country (and others). In particular, what the State
receives in return for marital tax, pension, inheritance and other
advantages remains a mystery. Another mystery is why this strange new
institution created, supposedly, in the name of “equality”, is
restricted to sexual partners yet is unavailable to, say, golf buddies
who choose not to share a bed.
As far as the golf buddies or
those spinster sisters are concerned, Civil Partnerships are most
certainly a form of “Sexual Apartness”. No sex, no Civil
Partnership (though I wonder who is supposed to police this).
But I doubt the drafters of
tonight’s motion had that kind of Apartness in mind. I suspect the
Apartness refers to the fact that the State has not legislated for same
sex couples to enter into a “marriage”, notwithstanding that as
discussed this would be an oxymoron.
Nevertheless, it is worth
restating exactly why, compared with other human institutions, marriage
carries certain advantages, in particular tax breaks designed to
encourage couples to marry. Governments have no money, they only spend
other people’s cash (called taxes). Therefore they have no right to
spend anything – or to grant tax breaks – without a clear and likely
payback. The marriage payback for the State is twofold, enormous and
unique to marriage.
Firstly, it is the institution
most likely to procreate babies. This is no laughing matter, for
without babies there will be no future citizens. Indeed no-one to repay
the gigantic
€120 billion debt this country has piled up and is still
disgracefully adding to at an unconscionable rate of
€22 billion a year. Above all, babies are an existential issue:
without them there will be no state. Just ask babyless Russia, Japan
and Germany which are in the throes of terminal and irreversible demographic
decline.
This statement is backed by
overwhelming documentary evidence (which you can find at tinyurl.ie/oq)
showing that outcomes are, in general, better for children
in terms of
child poverty,
sexual
& physical child abuse,
school drop-out,
physical & mental ill-health,
skills,
pay,
drugs misuse,
criminal behaviour,
becoming divorced or unwed parents themselves.
While of course there are exceptions on all sides –
meaning there are instances of dreadful married parents and examples of
wonderful single or gay parents – no systematic studies dispute this
crucial finding.
Legislation should be dealing with
the general not the exception, and
thus for the good of the State encouraging marriage over
other family forms. For these reasons, there is no case for the State
to involve itself in either gay marriage or civil partnerships.
Nevertheless it would be grossly
unfair and unequal if the State or anyone were to attempt to prevent
them taking place. But they should simply be private arrangements and
personal commitments made between willing individuals.
It’s just none of the State’s damn
business and it should keep its interfering nose out. You have to
wonder why otherwise somewhat anarchic LGBTs are so keen to bring the
State into their bedrooms.
So in conclusion, are Civil Partnerships
Sexual Apartheid? Well obviously not “Apartheid” so let’s say
Apartness. They are Sexual Apartness in the sense that
for no rational purpose they are open only to couples who practice gay
sex, not those spinster sisters or bridge partners or golf buddies.
But in
terms of Apartness vis-ŕ-vis marriage, such partnerships have been
designed and constructed so as to be legally scarcely different from
marriage, despite applying to a situation that is entirely different
from marriage. Applying the “same” or “equal” or non-“Apartness”
solution to two entirely different situations makes no sense at all.
And it’s certainly not discriminatory to treat different situations in
different ways.
I ask you
to vote against the motion.
Thank you very much.
A voice-vote was held after the last speech. It fell overwhelmingly in
favour of one side of the debate. I leave you to figure out which!
Hydraulic Fracturing[P!]
Letter published in the Sunday Times on 9th October
Many misunderstanding surrounds the technique of hydraulic fracturing
that you discuss. Fraccing (to use the oil industry's spelling) is
by no means a new technology - it's been around for half a century. It
is a matter of pumping fluid (usually water) into rock formation to
cause it to fracture open and increase the paths by which ...
Ignorance about Hydraulic Fracturing in Leitrim Letter to the Irish Times Last week RTE ran a crazy Prime Time discussion about producing gas
in Leitrim by hydraulically fracturing shale, crazy because it involved
three spokespersons who clearly had a very shaky grasp of the technology
...
'Botox Bob' dilemma for men of a certain age Online comment (p2+) in the Irish Times
This is a great article, very entertaining, especially because of
all the whining comments it elicited - 10 out of 13! Whingers -
you sound more ridiculous than ...
More power to us if we choose nuclear option Online comment in the Irish Times
Good to see you back in the Irish Times, John, if only for the rich
pickings you provide! This time it's your statement that “On the other
hand, at least three million people will die this year as a result of
... mining and burning of fossil fuels ...” ...
Legal system provides no guarantee of justice Online comment in the Irish Times
An excellent and shocking analysis. But the author is completely
misguided when he complains about
“all the trappings
of a royal court – wigs, gowns, prayer bands, tipstaffs”
...
Let's make Norway joint owner of our oil and gas Online comment in the
Irish Times article This article is unbelievably infantile! Firstly, Ireland does not
have
“reserves of 6.5
billion barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of gas off the western
seaboard”.
This is just a wild futuristic guestimate of what might be there ...
The end is nigh and it's all because of single mothers Online comments (p3)
in Irish Times Hourihane No serious commentator is criticising single mothers
per se [for the mass lootings in England]. The issue is the absence of fathers and the seriously
deleterious effect of this ...
“Merely a study document” Letter to The Economist on 9th August You wrongly and misleadingly say that the
Vatican dismissed child-protection procedures set up by Irish bishops in
1996 as “merely a study document”. The actual letter of 31st
January 1997 from the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland where this phrase
appeared is clear ...
Quote: “The world has lost a visionary, and there may be no greater
tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of
his passing on a device he invented.”
US president Barrack Obama pays
tribute
to Steve Jobs, the late founder and CEO of Apple
Quote:
“To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community: I
have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my
duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you
know. Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple.”
Steve Jobs, the founder and visionary
CEO of Apple,
and inspiration for iEverything,
bows to the pancreatic cancer that, sadly, has been
slowly killing him for
seven years
“10yrs ago we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash and
Bob Hope
... Now we have no jobs, no cash and no hope!”
Anonymous
- - - - - L I B Y A - - - - -
Quote: “We are asking Israel to use its influence in the
international community to end the tyrannical regime of [Moammar]
Q'Daffy and his family.”
Ahmad Shabani, a rebel spokesman and member of Libya’s
emerging leadership, makes a curious and encouraging
call to Israel for help;
perhaps for Mossad to find and even eliminate Libya's ex-leader.
Quote:
“I am afraid if we don't act, they will burn Tripoli.
There will be no more water, food, electricity or freedom.”
Libya's Col Q'Daffy, in a Chemical Ali
moment,
as Tripoli falls, signalling his own demise
- - - - - U K - - - - -
Quote: “If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society,
family and parenting is where we’ve got to start ... So from here on I want
a family test to be applied to all domestic policy. If it hurts families, if
it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keep people
together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it.”
David Cameron, in a welcome burst of
pro-family oratory.
Let's see whether he actually promotes
such fine words into legislative action.
- - - - O B A M A ' s U S
A - - - - -
Quote:
“Your policy has been one which I fully understand - I’m
not second-guessing - of one child per family.”
US Vice President Joe Biden tells the
Chinese Communist Party
that its policy of industrial-scale enforced abortion, infanticide and
sterilisation,
with a strong bias for
female gendercide,
is just fine by America
Quote:
“Throughout
history, poverty is the normal
condition of man. Advances which
permit this norm
to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are
the work of an extremely small minority, frequently
despised, often
condemned, and almost always
opposed by all right-thinking people.
Whenever this
tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes
happens) is driven out of a society, the people then
slip back into
abject poverty. This is known as
‘bad
luck’.”
Robert Heinlein, once
America's
“dean”
of science fiction writers,
who died in 1988
Quote: “We had
reversed the
recession, avoided
a depression,
gotten the
economy moving
again. But over the
last six months
we've
had a run of
bad luck.”
Barack Obama, whining
in Decorah, Iowa
in 2011
Why can't someone just find a way to eliminate
“bad luck”?
Quote:
“I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above
above the world, he's sort of god.”
Evan Thomas, editor of Newsweek magazine,
being interviewed by Chris Matthews,
who once
declared that Mr Obama gave him a
“thrill up hisleg” or something.
Well he is a thrilling god. Isn't he?
Quote:
“Those of us who were bewitched by [Obama's]
eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting
aspects of his biography:
that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having
never run a business or a state;
that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor,
publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than
an autobiography; and
that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted
‘present’ (instead of ‘yea’ or ‘nay’) 130 times, sometimes dodging
difficult issues.”
Drew Westen, a columnist in the New York Times,
belatedly agrees with my own contemporaneous observations
of Senator Obama as an
“empty
gong”.
It is rare that the NYT will allow any criticism of the Chosen One.
Quote:
“President Obama - this is personal
to you. All the black people was proud - we got a black president. You
acting like one now, B. Pay your f**king bills on time!”
Felonius Munk (real name Denis Banks),
a black comedian and commentator, is
not impressed
by the US deficit caused by out-of-control federal spending
Quote:
“It's true, I am not an American. I was not born in Hawaii,
I wasn't born in the United Sates of America, I come from Kenya.”
This is an extraordinary, unforced
admission on video
by the US president that he is constitutionally ineligible
to be the US president.
But its' a
hoax,
albeit an extraordinarily skilful one.
Enjoy the
Youtube
clip!
- - - - - I R E L A N D - - - - -
New
(11 Oct) -
Quote: “I want justice for my father. I believe that you know
the names of the killers of my father and I want you to tell me who they
are. You were on the army council of the IRA [when he wsas murdered by
the IRA]”
David Kelly, 35, whose soldier-father
was murdered at age 35
by an IRA team of four while trying to rescue Don Tidy,
a supermarket executive kidnapped by the IRA in 1983,
discomfits Martin McGuinness, Irish presidential candidate and ex IRA
boss
Quote: “Just because you are chained to the post doesn’t mean you
can’t bark at the dogs.”
Dáithí Ó Sé, host of the 2011
Rose of Tralee contest,
and recently
engaged to the 2009 New Jersey Rose Rita Talty,
after journalists chided him for observing
that all the Roses are “so beautiful”.
- - - - - S T E Y N - - - - -
Quote:
“A woman's place is in the kitchen dressing a 1,200-pound
moose she took down out back at dawn.”
“The Lemon Tree”, by Sandy
Tol (2006),
is a delightful novel-style history of modern Israel and Palestine told
through the eyes of a thoughtful protagonist from either side, with a
household lemon tree as their unifying theme.
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as
This examines events which led to BP's 2010 Macondo blowout in
the Gulf of Mexico.
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous
acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless
cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term
technical sustainability.
Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in
refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in
Russia.
The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that
had become poisonous and incompetent.
However the book is gravely compromised by a
litany of over 40 technical and stupid
errors that display the author's ignorance and
carelessness.
It would be better
to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying.
As for BP, only a
wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will
prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once
mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history.
This is
nonagenarian Alistair Urquhart’sincredible story of survival in the Far
East during World War II.
After recounting a
childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen,
Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on
Germany in 1939.
From then until the
Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr
Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall
of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror.
After a wretched
journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless
garrison.
Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in
1941, he is, successively,
part of a death march to Thailand,
a slave labourer on the Siam/Burma
railway (one man died for every sleeper laid),
regularly beaten and tortured,
racked by starvation, gaping ulcers
and disease including cholera,
a slave labourer stevedoring at
Singapore’s docks,
shipped to Japan in a stinking,
closed, airless hold with 900 other sick and dying men,
torpedoed by the Americans and left
drifting alone for five days before being picked up,
a slave-labourer in Nagasaki until
blessed liberation thanks to the Americans’ “Fat Boy” atomic
bomb.
Chronically ill,
distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the
British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s
is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this
unputdownable book.
There are very few
first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese
brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical
document.
+++++
“Culture of Corruption:
Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies”
This is a rattling good tale of the web
of corruption within which the American president and his cronies
operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both
a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and
sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP.
With 75 page of notes to back up - in
best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing
allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with
the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife.
Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett,
Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris
Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book.
ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community
organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine
it is.
+++++
This much trumpeted sequel to
Freakonomics is a bit of disappointment.
It is really just
a collation of amusing
little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour
and situations. For example:
Drunk walking kills more people per
kilometer than drunk driving.
People aren't really altruistic -
they always expect a return of some sort for good deeds.
Child seats are a waste of money as
they are no safer for children than adult seatbelts.
Though doctors have known for
centuries they must wash their hands to avoid spreading infection,
they still often fail to do so.
Monkeys can be taught to use washers
as cash to buy tit-bits - and even sex.
The book has no real
message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and
try to look for simple rather than complex solutions.
And with a final
anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in
its tracks. Weird.
++++++
A remarkable, coherent attempt by Financial Times economist Alan Beattie
to understand and explain world history through the prism of economics.
It's chapters are
organised around provocative questions such as
Why does asparagus come from Peru?
Why are pandas so useless?
Why are oil and diamonds more trouble
than they are worth?
Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine?
It's central thesis
is that economic development continues to be impeded in different
countries for different historical reasons, even when the original
rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
Argentina protects its now largely
foreign landowners (eg George Soros)
Russia its military-owned
businesses, such as counterfeit DVDs
The US its cotton industry
comprising only 1% of GDP and 2% of its workforce
The author writes
in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to
digest.
However it would
benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative
points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide
natural break-points for the reader.
+++++
This is a thrilling book of derring-do behind enemy lines in the jungles
of north-east Burma in 1942-44 during the Japanese occupation.
The author was
a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to
harass Japanese lines of
command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide
intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of
India.
Irwin
is admirably yet brutally frank, in his
descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a
prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing
in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness.
He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of
Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved
authority of the British.
The book amounts to
a very human and exhilarating tale.
Oh, and Irwin
describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF
Brennan.