So where do I get the
idea that journalists are simply a bunch who know how to write and broadcast
but know little about anything else? And
who infect each other with leftist politics?
Watching the Weather
Channel this morning, I got an education of blowout preventers. The bozo with the microphone told us that
hardly anybody knew what a blowout preventer was until the BP oil disaster and
that oil companies don’t like to talk about blowout preventers. The gist of the article was about some guy
who has invented an undersea cleaner to clean things dropped on the deep sea
floor of mud and other contaminants.
Good invention. But the author
went on to say that the notion that things might be dropped under construction
is hush-hush by the evil oil industry.
Hunh? Blowout preventers have been around since the
1920s. They are the things that keep
wells from spewing crude into the air.
Come to Oklahoma and talk to anybody who works on a drilling rig. Or anybody in an oil company. Or just about any casual citizen who lives
around the oil industry. Any lawyer,
state regulator, or accountant who has ever seen an Income and Expense sheet
for an oil and gas concern. If you have
a reservoir two miles deep and an overburden of rock that is at least twice as
heavy as water, it’s like sitting on a water balloon and poking a hole with a
needle through a bore hole straw. Do you
think the water will try to blow out the straw?
Same with an oil or gas well. So now as we approach the 100th
anniversary of blowout preventers with an entire competitive industry of well
services, the journalists are clueless of their existence.
Now it’s okay to be a
layman and not know about the engineering, but to then to blame that your own
stupidity on perniciousness of an industry is sort of telling about your own
moral character. Let me give another
example. The left has been fretting
about how the Hobby Lobby decision will allow Big Companies to use religion to
exonerate and extricate themselves from other things they dislike like taxes. Indeed, I sit facing a cartoon that shows a
tall building labeled as megareligion corporation and big headlines about how
the company wants poor pay for women, no minimum wage, and no pensions, no
taxes. I have one little question. Does the writer know anything about any
religion out there? Did Jesus say
something about not liking minimum wage?
Did Buddha nix pensions? Lao-tzu
decry taxes? Maybe Moses wanted his sister Miriam to work for free. Okay, so Islam might want unequal pay but
that’s something for the Justice department to pursue. The point is that the Godless Left knows so
little about faith it’s laughable. They
spew airheaded manure and believe their own dung.
Finally came a supposedly
serious article by AP, “Absolutely Pretentious” about how the US economy is
just wondrously better than all the rest of the world, and immune to the
problems that plague those other poor countries. The author lists reasons why. Employment is booming with 288,000 jobs
created, entrepreneurship is just sky high, USA knows better than to cut
spending much, and the stock market is glorious. Hmm.
The jobs report for this month shows 800,000 part-time jobs created and
500,000 full-time jobs lost giving a net +288,000. But the loss of all those
full-time jobs is troubling, by most any economist’s thinking. USA has gradually stopped being a highly
entrepreneurial country under the thumb of heavy regulation. Before the 90’s, 13 to 14% of companies were
less than a year old showing a lot of new enterprises starting—a statistic true
for over a hundred years. Today we are
down to 6-8%, the statistic that reminds one of France and the PIIGS countries
of the European Union. Germany has more
start-ups than USA. Deficit spending has
continued so long that debt service will become a devastating issue if the
interest rate ever goes up—in other words, when the economy tries to
improve. So our national debt may be a
drag on overall growth for years to come.
Finally stocks now trade at an average price-to-earnings ratio of
25. Historically US stocks have traded
at 10-16 P/E and whenever they have gone above 20, they won’t stay that way for
long. Either a crash or sea change of
earnings increases has to take place.
If anything, this AP article
could be viewed as a strong indicator of a market crash, like Joe Kennedy, a
week before Black Monday, listening to the shoe shine boy talk equities and
concluding that things had come to a pretty pass and it was time to get out of
the market. Me? I just think it is time to stop listening to the
journalists.
