The $390 Billion Cost of Cheaper Oil Prices

We've noticed that retail gasoline stations no longer feature what baseball calls "crooked numbers" in their posted prices. Regular is now below two dollars per gallon in New Jersey, where we live. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Image: dailyfreep.com

Well, it does and it doesn't. The negative side is occurring in the new oil-patch state of North Dakota, where, as a Fox News story notes, state revenues are coming up over five billion dollars short of projections. While that's Monopoly money in Silicon Valley and Manhattan, that's real money in the Great Plains.

Today's Bloomberg Business includes a story about the economic impact of falling oil prices in the larger economy. The tally? $390 billion. Some officials interviewed for the article believed local oil-patch banks, which happily loaned money to drilling firms, might "feel pain." The pinch might also be noticed among those pension funds, mutual funds, and other investment vehicles which put their clients' money where the oil firms' mouths were. That net includes just about everyone, period.

Meanwhile, GOP Congressional backers of the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to ship Canadian oil to American Gulf Coast ports and facilities, are pushing toward legislative approval of this environmental disaster in the making. One would think that cheap oil would knock out the key argument in the pipeline's favor. However, that line of reasoning would be rational, an approach the GOP does not appear to embrace. Just to keep things fair and balanced, President Obama recently said he would set in motion permission for oil drilling off the US Atlantic coast. His stance frankly made as little sense as the Republican Party's urgency to push Keystone through a legislative keyhole.

Whatever happened to Sarah Palin's battle-cry "Drill, Baby, Drill"? Who would have ever imagined a Palin-inspired idea would become something both political parties' poo-bahs would advocate?

Chinese Maker of White House-Crash Drone to Block Flights Over DC

Drone that crashed at White House
(Image: nypost.com)

The drone (technically a "quad copter") that crashed at the White House recently has created some interesting ripples in legal and security circles.

For starters, a Chinese firm called DJI manufactured the offending drone. According to gizmodo.com, the company "will take steps" to prevent its drones from flying over the District of Columbia. Apparently, DJI drone flight paths can be controlled via a firmware modification.

Meanwhile, the drone's pilot worked for an American intelligence agency. The public version of the story was that he visited an apartment in the vicinity of the White House, had a few drinks, and then decided to launch the drone on its ill-fated flight. Uh-huh.

Fortunately, the president and the missus were shaking hands in India. However, the Obamas' two daughters were in DC at the time of the incident. For those inclined toward semiotic, Mafia-like messages from the dark side, the drone episode could be characterized as an unpleasant communication to the White House. A number of odd incidents have occurred during 44's presidency, such as a sudden change in 2011 presidential helicopter flight in Maryland, Air Force One having "mechanical issues," and the entry of an armed individual into the first floor of the White House. The drone story, considering its link to the nation's intelligence community, plausibly fits into this scenario. Let's hope there's nothing more to the incident than coincidence.

Google Fiber Expands to Southern Cities

When we last considered Google Fiber, the uber-fast network raised eyebrows with its initial foray into Kansas City. It was generally assumed KC was the petri dish for a much larger experiment from Mountain View's scientists, engineers, and marketing teams. With the recent announcement that the Fiber product will expand into mid-sized Southern cities, Google moves into its next expansion phase for its telecom initiative. Theverge.com, and other sources, reported the news today.

The four cities -- Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham -- make sense for Fiber. They contain a mix of data-hungry enterprises, young tech-friendly populations, cooperative local and state governments, and economically-defined communities. They also are somewhat under the media radar, with the possible exception of Nashville's music crowd. That arrangement suits Google's experimental purpose, which is to roll out and learn about Fiber far from Silicon Valley's tech sharks or New York's insatiable gossip machine.

In a world where speed rules, Google Fiber's capability becomes very alluring for households, institutions, and businesses. And what Google is offering is completely fair and within the Net Neutrality guidelines that Comcast and other cable providers are openly fighting. Whether one thinks it's wise for the world's largest search provider to rule the pipeline into physical structures is another story.

Sean Penn to Receive Honorary Cesar

Sean Penn
(Image: cnn.com)

According to the Parisian newspaper Liberation, the quintessentially American actor Sean Penn will receive a major award from the French film establishment next month. An honorary Cesar, the Gallic version of an Oscar, will be presented to Penn for his lifetime acting and directing accomplishments.

Penn has a long-standing connection to the French movie biz. He earned a Cesar in 1997 for his work on She's So Lovely. He received a second Cesar in 2009 for his performance in Milk. Penn has also participated on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

Bob Hope's "Volcano Home" Sale Not Finding Buyers

Image: zillow.com

In the early 1970s, Bob Hope and his wife Dolores commissioned architect John Lautner to create their dream house. The resulting Palm Springs structure led to recriminations between the artist and the patrons. The house remained. According to a story in today's sfgate.com, the Hopes' notion of Xanadu has been tabbed as the "Volcano Home" and the "UFO House," largely due to its resemblance to those ominous archetypes.

The house that Hope built also has a "for sale" sign on it. The original 2013 asking price was over fifty million Yankee dollars. It appears to be a tough sell, and the current list price is $25 million.

I can't wait to learn how a house inspector would proceed to prepare his or her report on the property.

Upgraded Version of Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust Documentary to be Broadcast

Image: austinchronicle.com

In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock helped create a documentary that depicted the macabre reality of the Nazi extermination machine. The director used footage Allied soldiers shot in Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps. According to an article in the UK newspaper The Guardian, the movie did not see the light of day for decades, apparently due to "political reasons." A truncated version was shown in Berlin about thirty years ago. In 1985, the US television network PBS broadcast the film, but one The Guardian article claimed was "poor quality."

The UK's Imperial War Museum completed a restoration project that has brought the Hitchcock documentary to its complete form and visual integrity. The film will be shown this year on British television.

Meanwhile, Time noted that HBO will broadcast a Holocaust documentary called Night Will Fall, which will include the story of the footage that Hitchcock used, and show some of it. Of course, the opportunity to view "unseen" Hitchcock work should not be missed. The larger reason to view the film became evident recently, courtesy of the massacre of Charlie Hebdou staffers and related, hate-inspired murders in a Paris kosher supermarket.

HBO will show Night Will Fall on January 26th, with a repeat presentation on HBO2 the following day. Viewers are advised that some footage will be graphic and disturbing.

Pennsylvania Attorney General, Critic of Sandusky Probe, To Be Indicted for Perjury

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane
(Image: philly.com)

Kathleen Kane, the first Democrat elected to Pennsylvania's attorney general office, faces a perjury rap. It's an interesting cautionary tale into power politics and the muscle certain institutions wield to defend what they consider their turf.

A few years ago, Ms. Kane took on some of the Keystone State's most formidable and entrenched forces. According to a New York Times article on her current legal troubles, she "criticized her Republican predecessors in the state's attorney general office of stalling during their investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State University (PSU) assistant football coach, who was eventually convicted of sexually abusing children." The investigation took "about three years before charges were filed," the Times noted.

The Sandusky-Joe Paterno scandal did more than simply rock Pennsylvania's political apparatus. Penn State, as an institution, has tremendous influence. Its research programs and other university initiatives generate hundreds of millions in revenue. What became evident during the investigation of Sandusky was the PSU administration's moral bankruptcy. Only when the US Department of Education hinted that Penn State's federal millions would be in jeopardy did the Penn State Board of Trustees and shameless top U execs surrender to decency.

Joe Paterno

Kane's crime in the eyes of many connected to Penn State was her hostility toward the Joe Paterno cult. The late football coach's backers, who remain a potent juggernaut in Pennsylvania, continue to attempt to rehabilitate Paterno's reputation to its once saintly status. They have succeeded in part, thanks to the NCAA's recent, shameful retreat regarding PSU football program's punishment for the Sandusky affair. (The litigation against the NCAA ruling was spearheaded by Pennsylvania's Republican Senate majority leader and the Republican state treasurer.) However, the NCAA knows Penn State is a big bucks football program, with an extensive alum network and political clout.

The current Pennsylvania AG, according to the Times,  also smoked out state employees who thought it appropriate to send unwanted, sexually explicit e-mails to others in state government. A state Supreme Court justice was among those who left their jobs in disgrace.

Whether Kane is innocent or guilty of perjury is almost a sideshow. How the Empire -- the Paterno cult and Keystone State poo-bahs -- strikes back is the more intriguing story.

Peter Thiel's Hush-Hush Palantir Technologies to Raise More Capital

Peter Thiel

Silicon Valley-based and venture capital darling Palantir Technologies provides an interesting case study of today's military-tech complex. The firm, founded by PayPal and Facebook zillionaire Peter Thiel, "sells software for data mining and data visualization," according to reporter Heather Somerville's recent story posted in siliconvalley.com. That bland definition gains color and form when one learns more about the enterprise's hush-hush client list. A story appearing earlier this year on techcrunch.com cited internal Palantir documents from 2013 noting the company's contractual relationships with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, portions of the Armed Services, and the Los Angeles Police Department.

In this context, Thiel is marching in step with Amazon's notoriously secretive Jeff Bezos. As you may recall, Amazon controversially won a CIA data management contract, as well as a similar deal with NASA. Big Data's coziness and opaque contracts with the military and especially the intelligence communities should give one pause. As the Snowden revelations made clear, it's a very short step from dodgy data collection to unacknowledged data sharing.

Meanwhile, federal contracts, such as those obtained by Palantir and Amazon, are money magnets. That's why Palantir was able to land a half-billion dollars from VC investors in 2014. The siliconvalley.com story notes that Thiel's data gold mine is looking for more money, and is very likely to get it. Palantir's ability to easily obtain venture capital suggests the company may generate a financial windfall. The bet is that the firm's lucrative connections with the "military" side of the military-tech complex will become entrenched and, ironically, insulated from partisan politics.

X-Rays Read Rare, Roman-Era Vesuvius Scroll

Herculaneum scroll
(Image: bbc.co.uk)

The BBC reported that a European-led scientific team used a 3-D X-ray tool to read a fragile scroll found near the southern Italian archaeological site of Herculaneum. The original document was nearly burned to a crisp during the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum in 79 A.D. Today, the scrolls simply fall apart at the slightest touch, which is why the X-ray technique offers some hope of reading the scripts on them.

The significance of the project cannot be underestimated. The reliability and completeness of ancient texts remain a moving target. To obtain material from antiquity that's as authentic and true as possible profoundly adds to our understanding of the ideas that shaped generations, and continues to do so.

Tehran Bans Paper Showing George Clooney Wearing "Je Suis Charlie" Button

The current Iranian regime has recently put on a diplomatic smiley face, presumably to make a nuke/sanctions deal with major Western nations. However, behind the smile remains a ruling, militant Islamic theocracy. Those fun loving beards in Tehran just revoked the license of a newspaper which had the (dare I say it) chutzpah to publish a photograph of George Clooney wearing a "Je Suis Charlie" button. According to a Reuters report reprinted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the offending three-week-old publication had supported a reform movement in the Islamic Republic. Now the Iranian newspaper will not be free to speak its mind, or anything, for that matter.

Italian Film Director Francesco Rosi -- RIP

Francesco Rosi (right) during filming of
The Moment of Truth, a splendid movie
about a Spanish bullfighter and the
social conditions that shaped him.

The Italian film director Francesco Rosi recently passed away at age 92. His career was characterized by his firm intention to depict individual psychological reality and the environments which shaped his movies' characters. I think Rosi was a great director, although his movies gain power and eloquence if a viewer knows something about Italy, its social drama, and its history. I've linked a YouTube clip showing my favorite segment from Hands Over the City, which shows an animated Naples council meeting in which corrupt members gestured that their hands were clean  -- mani pulite. Part of the sequence's strength is Rosi's use of actual council members as actors. Supposedly, the council members kept arguing with each other after Rosi said the Italian version of "cut." I hope the clip provides some sense of Rosi's directorial skill and insight.

Rosi had many admirers among film makers, one of whom was Martin Scorsese. Rosi's American counterpart released a statement concerning the Neapolitan maestro which Variety cited in its Rosi obit. It's included in full here:

Francesco Rosi was, without a doubt, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of Italian cinema—really, when all is said and done, one of the greatest filmmakers we’ve ever had, period. Rosi’s greatest films – ‘Hands Over the City,’ ‘The Mattei Affair,’ ‘Lucky Luciano,’ ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli,’ ‘Three Brothers’ and the incomparable ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ among them – are unlike anything else in cinema: complex historical investigations, as passionately devoted to uncovering painful truths as they are to celebrating the beauty and poetry of the people and the land Rosi loved with all his heart. There are so many passages in those pictures that have permanently marked me: the young husband sifting through the sand for his wife’s ring in ‘Three Brothers,’ the collapse of the building in ‘Hands Over the City,’ the mother wailing over her son’s body in ‘Salvatore Giuliano’… So many more… 

I had the honor of knowing the man. For me, Franco Rosi meant vitality, strength, fortitude, and the fiercest love – in a word, spirit. He led a long life and a good one, but it saddens me more than I can say to know that he is no longer among us. I’ll state it simply: he was the master.

Addio, Francesco e sogni d'oro.

Venture Capital Firm High on Its Legal Marijuana Investment

Pot
(Image: dea.gov)

One of America's few growth industries is the legit pot business. As more states legalize marijuana sales and use, most would assume there's money to be made. While you don't need to be a financial wizard to understand the opportunity, the smarter money realizes that a strategic business approach requires deep pockets.

One such example of "smart money" is PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. According to a story in today's Los Angeles Times, Founders Fund, an enterprise partly run by Thiel, is "making a multimillion-dollar investment in a cannabis-focused private equity firm called Privateer Holdings."

How does the "smart money" appraise Privateer Holding's business prospects? "(W)e believe it will be a massive industry within the next decade," observed Founders Fund partner Geoff Lewis. Clearly, they're not envisioning that their investment will go up in smoke.

I Am Not David Brooks: A Reply to His NY Times Op-Ed Column

David Brooks' misguided opinion piece in today's New York Times regarding reaction to the terriorist slaughter of Charlie Hebdou's staff requires reply.

David Brooks
(Image: nytimes.com)

His first assertion compares the French journal Charlie Hebdou to a flippant American college publication. This insulting observation suggests a parallel between frat house humor and the determined political satire of those skilled professionals twice or three times the age of an American college undergraduate. Hmmm...maybe Mr. Brooks is just another old fart who doesn't get it. Then again, in subsequent paragraphs, the Times' man on the right-wing pulse characterizes Charlie Hebdou's content as "puerile."

Ah, but the Times' version of a "moderate Republican" voice is not content with cheap shots against the Gallic dead. He has the chutzpah to compare the massacre of the French writers and editors to those professors on physically safe US campuses whose controversial voices were hushed or hounded by cowardly university administrators. These episodes simply do not parallel the Paris murders in depth or impact. He also ignored how Charlie Hebdou's editor required police protection for years, simply because the French editor exercised his right to free speech.

Brooks's coup de grace is his separation of the intelligent world into an "adults' table" and a "kids' table." Amazingly, Brooks breezily asserts that "establishment organs" command the grown-up seating. This frankly flies in the face of experience, whether one disbelieves bullshit from Fox News or horseshit from The Huffington Post. He then has the nerve to lump Ann Coulter and Bill Maher together into the children's zone. From that statement, one can only assume that the late Charlie Hebdou staff members deserve high chairs and bibs; in the meantime, Brooks would presumably sit still for rants from alleged adults such as Mort Zuckerman, John McLaughlin, and Melissa Harris-Perry.

How can anyone respect Brooks' line of reasoning? In the end, Brooks ironically created a parody of a cogent argument, more in tune with Charlie Hebdou than sacred cow publications he arrogantly assumes hold exclusive rights to "adult" perspectives.

Je Suis Charlie

Image: en.wikipedia.com

Ferguson Grand Juror Sues To Remove Gag Order About Michael Brown Case

Image: blogs.denverpost.com

The American grand jury system has earned its share of judicial lumps. The most recent episode was the probe into whether Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson should have been indicted for Michael Brown's death. Some criticized the St. Louis County prosecutor's handling of the matter, suggesting strongly that the district attorney rigged the case in the cop's favor. One issue with grand jury proceedings its its secrecy. While the county official released hundreds of pages of testimony related to the case, the societal jury is very much out on the propriety of the case.

According to an Associated Press story posted in sfgate.com, a grand juror involved with the Wilson proceedings has filed suit to remove the gag order. The litigation, done in concert with the American Civil Liberties Union, does not aim to eliminate grand jury secrecy. Rather, for what the ACLU and the juror essentially characterized as the good of society, the gag would be removed for just the Wilson case. The juror believes the St. Louis County prosecutor created a distorted perspective regarding the "unanimity" of the grand jury's sentiment.

The juror would like to set the record straight. Hey, why stop justice now?

Mark Zuckerberg Launches Facebook Book Group

Mark Zuckerberg

The first week of January defines high tide for new year resolutions. My local YMCA, for example, experiences an attendance spike during this temporary wave of virtue. Others wish to improve their own and others' minds. A case in point is Facebook's major shareholder and Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. He recently launched on Facebook a de facto book club which proposes to focus on serious titles addressing important topics.

Zuckerberg's resolution, under the title "A Year of Books," asserts that he will read one book every two weeks. He also intends to become engaged via Facebook in a useful community discussion of each book's principal points. It will be very interesting to observe this laudable project's progress in the coming months.

It's easy and fair to criticize Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook's ruthless data strip mining techniques and hypocritical privacy perspective. However, his attempt to create a community intended to stimulate intellectual engagement stands above the wave of smug corporate promises for a "successful" new year. Zuckerberg deserves credit for promoting thoughtful, extended reading. Alas, "A Year of Books" does have something of a tidal feeling. What happens to the community of readers when the "Year of Books" ends on January 1, 2016?

Elvis' Private Jets To Be Auctioned

Bedroom on the Lisa Marie, one of Elvis Presley's two private jets.
(Image: bbc.co.uk)

If you're in the market for a private jet decorated in a circa mid-1970s style, consider bidding on one of Elvis Presley's two private jets. According to a BBC report, the King's air transportation will be available for purchase via auction in the coming days. While neither aircraft is currently fit for flight, both planes' interiors retain Elvis' taste for tasteless style (e.g., gold faucets) and his uninhibited embrace of luxury.

Presley never took his rags-to-riches story for granted. Today's tech zillionaires offer an interesting counterpoint to the King. Some Silicon Valley monarchs believe they are a priori entitled to private jets and other trappings of success. In contrast, the late Elvis Presley seems like a breath of fresh air: the King always knew he was a hound dog. The private jets were his way of both recognizing his low-down soul and celebrating his apotheosis into an immortal icon.