Saturday Morning News

If you get the opportunity to see Tim's Vermeer, don't pass it up. This is an incredibly good documentary. My wife took me to see it at the Ft Worth Museum of Modern Art for our anniversary.

In the articles on oil in The Wall Street Journal below, there is a very, very interesting backstory that is not getting a lot of ink: the increasing demand for oil. The data may or may not reflect that demand (which, of course, doesn't make sense) but when oil continues to trade at $100 despite surging output (see below) and despite Obama's release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,  that suggests that demand for oil may be bigger than folks realize. I'm probably wrong, but there certainly seemed to be an underlying theme in the oil articles below.

By the way, the Crimean conflict is having much less effect on the price of oil for one reason: the Bakken laboratory. I am not the first to notice that; that was first posited by an industry analyst.

The Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan on The Ukraine, Putin, and Obama

I do not read the op-ed section of the on-line edition of the WSJ and I seldom read it when I have the paper copy in front of me. I quit reading Peggy Noonan after she completely missed the Mitt Romney debacle in her last essay before that election. My wife dislikes the GOP -- fervently and passionately -- so we don't discuss politics much in our little hovel. I assumed the last person my wife would read would be Peggy Noonan so I was surprised she loved Ms Noonan's essay in the weekend edition of the WSJ. She asked me to read it. I did. I was very, very impressed.

I think my wife -- who used to only "know" Putin as a thug now knows Putin a whole lot better. She may know Obama a whole lot better but I don't dare ask. We're having a wonderful day out and about. Noonan's concluding thoughts in the linked essay:

The most obvious Ukraine point has to do with American foreign policy in the sixth year of the Obama era.

Not being George W. Bush is not a foreign policy. Not invading countries is not a foreign policy. Wishing to demonstrate your sophistication by announcing you are unencumbered by the false historical narratives of the past is not a foreign policy. Assuming the world will be nice if we're not militarist is not a foreign policy.

What is our foreign policy? Disliking global warming?

I find it interesting she picked up on this point. About a week ago I noted -- and was probably the only non-professional-blogger-writing-on-the-Bakken who noted that at the height of the crisis (up to that point) John Kerry was giving speeches on global warming. And so it goes. 

The Wall Street Journal

Flight probe (finally) focuses on sabotage. I find it remarkable how long it takes for the best and the brightest to admit the obvious. The answer lies with the pilot. Eight days into the probe, Malaysian officials visit the home of the pilot. And there they will find the answer. If multiple communication systems aboard Malaysia Flight 370 were manually disabled, as investigators increasingly suspect, it would have required detailed knowledge of the Boeing 777's inner workings. Investigators finally looking at pilots. The Washington Post is reporting that the plane may have flown for seven hours. A Malaysian spokesman said that Pakistan has not yet been asked by Malaysia to share its radar data, but will provide it if asked. (Sense of urgency?)

This absolutely does not make sense: fewer SBA loans are going to black borrowers.  The IRS can target right-wingers but apparently the SBA has not gotten the memo.

Front page: this year's tumbleweed accumulations in the US Southwest are historic in scale, piling up beside homesteads and blocking county roads. Renewable fuel?

ObamaCare deadline will be extended (again). Soon, enrollment will be 365/24/7. No brainer.

Iraq's oil output surges.

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UAW faces another southern setback. 

CANTON, Miss.—The United Auto Workers union headquarters here—tucked beside a cow pasture down the road from a sprawling Nissan Motor Co. plant—was supposed to be a springboard for a new wave of labor activism across the South.

It has become instead a center of discouragement and uncertainty in a state where many want the union to pack up and leave. Labor organizers at Nissan were shocked when auto workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., last month voted against joining the UAW, a blow that has deflated the drive to unionize at Nissan, the largest private employer in Mississippi.

Union foes "are winning," said Isiac Jackson, a Baptist pastor who heads the Mississippi Alliance For Fairness at Nissan, a group trying to rally UAW support. But, he added, "they haven't won the war."

UAW officials and pro-union workers say they won't hold a vote on whether to unionize at the Nissan plant until the company agrees to let union supporters make their pitch to workers inside the facility. Nissan officials say they won't let that happen.

The union faces other obstacles.

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Surge in oil production from US, Canada, and Iraq:

The dramatic increase in oil supply from the U.S. and Canada—coupled with a surprise surge in Iraqi output—helped stave off global demand pressures brought on by a cold U.S. winter and geopolitical concerns over rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The International Energy Agency, a watchdog for the world's biggest energy consumers, said North American output helped mitigate a bigger-than-expected draw from global crude inventories, caused by a colder than usual winter in the U.S. Surging Iraqi crude output, which rose to its highest level since 1979, also helped keep global markets supplied, and prices in check.

In recent years, new drilling and extraction techniques employed across North America—from shale-oil deposits in Texas to oil-sands reserves in Alberta—have boosted global supply.

That has helped steady global prices, acting as a sort of shock absorber amid big, recent output disruptions. U.S. and European economic sanctions against Iran have choked off a big chunk of Iranian oil to world markets, and Libyan unrest has all but shut off that country's once-prodigious oil shipments. Recent worry centered on Russia's moves in Crimea have also raised supply concerns.

 The Los Angeles Times

"Plane's disappearance was deliberate." -- Malaysian officials. Well, duh.

Bloomberg Businessweek

This is really quite incredible. The cover story in this week's issue of Bloomberg Businessweek is of the Target (the retail store) security breach. Not only is it the cover story, but it's the ONLY thing on the front cover other than the name of the magazine. Inside, six pages are devoted to the story, though two of the pages are non-value-added-graphic filler for some reason.

In that four-page story, this is about all one needs to know:

• December 2, 2013: Target's security system detects the hack, but the company -- incredibly -- fails to act; two systems identify the malware; alert Target's security team who do nothing
• December 12, 2013: federal investigators warn Target of a massive data breach
• December 15, 2013: Target confirmed and eradicated the malware, after 40 million card numbers had been stolen

By the way, this is the very same story that was published in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago (which I linked). I'm not sure whether the Journal published the entire Bloomberg article.

Not getting much attention: the security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and Pentagon, alerted Target of the breach BEFORE the malware started sending data back to the hackers. Target chose to ignore the warning.

Getting even less attention: why the CEO is still the CEO. Target's advice for consumers: continue to monitor your Target card's activity and the activity of all your credit cards. But don't change your credit card number.

FireEye is a security software company in Milpitas, CA, that was initially funded by the CIA and is used by intelligence agencies around the world.

Even the company's antivirus system, Symantec Endpoint Protection, identified suspicious behavior over several days around Thanksgiving -- pointing to the same server identified by FireEye alerts.

The malware was "absolutely unsophisticated and uninteresting" -- if Target had a firm grasp on its network security environment, "they absolutely would have observed this behavior occurring on its network."

The story line that no one reports, but explains why this breach is getting more attention than most (besides the fact that it affected one in three Americans): a lot of folks consider Target the "gold standard" of big box stores. Of all the big box stores, Target is probably the most trusted by its customers. Had this happened at Best Buy, Home Depot, Wel-Mart, the story would have been less "exciting." In the minds of many, there was no excuse for Target to have been breached. Learning that the malware was "absolutely unsophisticated and uninteresting" makes it much worse. Learning that Target was aware that malware was in their system but failed to act is ... unfathomable.

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ObamaCare

Federal government withholds "payment" data but states are starting to release it. Connecticut, California, and Minnesota are doing "okay," but:

Maryland is dead last. The state's exchange, which has been a technological disaster, saw just 54 percent of enrollees paying for their first premiums as of March 1. 

The exchanges operated by Washington state and Vermont also failed to crack 60 percent.

 ObamaCare enrollment center, downtown Ft Worth, TX, March 14, 2014

Some folks took me to task for calling the program "ObamaCare" 

In 2025, these centers will be as ubiquitous as Starbucks coffee shops