Thursday Morning News, Links, And Views

Active rigs: 186

RBN Energy: a nice discussion on how LNG exports might affect the price of natural gas and the US industrial revival. The linked article includes a nice graphic of all the existing/proposed US LNG export terminals -- and there are a lot.

Chemicals, gas-to-liquids (GTL), steel and other industries that consume large volumes of natural gas either directly or as a fuel, expecting the new era of low and stable gas prices to continue are planning tens of billions of dollars in new or expanded facilities in the U.S. But how many of those plans will become a reality? Could the much-anticipated industrial renaissance be undermined by the higher gas prices that might come with the approval of a few more LNG export terminals, new environmental regulations that spur still more gas-fired power generation, and higher natural gas exports to Mexico?

The Wall Street Journal

No movement in shutdown standoff. That suggests to me that internal polling does not yet show which side the American public is on. Again, when the major issue is opening national parks, and it took a special bill to pay the military, it put things into perspective. By the end of October, we are going to have a much bigger problem: debt ceiling. The president has said he will not negotiate on current shutdown nor on the debt ceiling. Speaks volumes about this president.

For those who support the president on this, this is very, very telling -- President Obama tried to shut privately owned Mount Vernon -- George Washington's home. Wow.  The pictures are worth a thousand words.

Les Miserables, the barricade scene   Switching gears, and just in time for Halloween:

George Bernard Shaw, often the most acerbic of critics, swooned over him. "Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty," Shaw wrote in 1909, the centenary of the writer's birth. 

By contrast, a less impressed T.S. Eliot chided Poe for his "carelessness and unscrupulousness in the use of words," though he acknowledged Poe's importance to French poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. In 1875, Walt Whitman was the only major American literary figure who deigned to show up at Poe's reburial and monument dedication in Baltimore. Whitman later wrote that he detected "a demoniac undertone behind every page," but nevertheless appreciated "Poe's genius."

These assessments are part of a Morgan Library & Museum exhibition, "Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul," that includes Poe daguerreotypes and other images; manuscripts, letters and first editions, and even a fragment of Poe's original coffin.

One bit of trivia on Poe from the article:

For example, Mr. Kiely says, "he was the first serious critic of Dickens in the U.S.," and managed to guess the outcome of the murder plot in Dickens's serialized "Barnaby Rudge." As a result, Dickens eliminated the clues Poe had identified when he published it in book form. The two writers met in Philadelphia in 1842, the year Poe went bankrupt, and a letter from Dickens to Poe is in the exhibition.

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From Bloomberg: while the US dithers, China surges:

A Chinese services-industry index rose to a six-month high, adding to signs that the world’s second-biggest economy will sustain a rebound after a two-quarter slowdown.
The non-manufacturing purchasing managers’ index rose to 55.4 in September from 53.9 in August, the Beijing-based National Bureau of Statistics and Federation of Logistics and Purchasing said today. A number more than 50 indicates an expansion.