Must Reading For Those Following The Bakken: Platt's Weekly Wrap-Up: The WTI/Brent Spread And How It Is Afffecting The Bakken; Imports Vs US Production: And Then This: The Tea Leaves Suggest, As Of Right Now, The Keystone Would Be Approved If A Decision Had To Be Announced

Fascinating reading. At Platt's.

Sometimes it is nice that Joe Biden is so talkative. Maybe it would be "fun" to have him as president; he would certainly be less dour than the current president. "Dour": I haven't used that word in a long time. And he would be better looking than his most likely Democratic challenger.

Platt's has an interesting point to make:

Ultimately, The Barrel has argued repeatedly that what matters is a country’s net imports of crude and products. If the US refining industry is bringing in crude that it processes and ships out as higher-value products, that doesn’t count against a country’s import dependence.

That is why I don't get excited about the US banning oil exports.

As long as I'm rambling: when I am in "my investment arena," I would be against permitting the Keystone XL. All my past arguments "for" the Keystone have been in the "political arena." At least that's my story now and I'm sticking to it. If my story has changed, there have been less than 12 iterations of changes, and any changes have simply been sylistic, to quote Art Carney.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or think you read here. 

By the way, Mr Biden was in the minority on Iraq also when he suggested Iraq should be broken up into three factions (Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds) under a Federalist government. His suggest to make Louis Farrakhan, President Obama, and Dick Cheney (the former head of Halliburton) honorary presidents of the three factions, respectively, was probably a bridge too far.

That last line about Farrakhan, Obama, and Cheney is not true; I made it up. At least, as far as I know, it is not true, but then "knowing" Mr Biden, anything's possible, I suppose.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I just sent the following e-mail note to my wife and our older daughter:

If you do not know who Freeman Dyson is,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

He was never awarded a Nobel Prize, but I bet he came close. He was among the greats.

I am reading his memoirs: it begins --

A small boy with a book, high up in a tree. When I was eight years old somebody gave me The Magic City by Edith Nesbit. Nesbit wrote a number of other children's books, which are more famous and better written. But this was the one which I loved and have never forgotten. I did not at the age of eight read deep meanings into it, but I knew that it was somehow special. The story was a coherent architectural plan, covered with a surface frosting of crazy logic. The Wizard of Oz was the other book that I used to read over and over again. It has the same qualities. An eight-year-old already has a feeling for such things, even if he spends most of his waking hours climbing trees. The Magic City is not just a story about some crazy kids It is a story about a crazy universe. What I see now, and did not see as an eight-year-old, is that Nesbit's crazy universe bears a strong resemblance to the one we live it.

I will always have vivid and wonderful memories of Arianna climbing trees, and reading books while in the tree, along with me.

Kiri, thank you for letting me go tree climbing with Arianna. I return at the end of May. Arianna and I might have one or two more opportunities to climb trees and read books.