Tuesday -- December 9, 2014; OPEC Faces An Insurgency, Not A Price War; Global Warming's Olympian Venue

I'm going to quit for the day. Yahoo!Mail is down, the market is down, and even my wi-fi is getting slower. I'm eager to get back to some reading (a hardcover book). I will be back later today. 

Yahoo!Mail is down! This is really, really cool. There's a site out there that tracks other websites to see if they "down." If folks haven't noticed, Yahoo!Mail goes down a lot, especially in some of the large metropolitan areas in the south (aka Dallas-Ft Worth metroplex). So, whenever a site goes down (Yahoo!Mail, gmail, Sprint, etc), just check this site: https://downdetector.com/status/yahoo-mail. Two minutes ago, Yahoo!Mail had no reported outages, but now it's spiking. (Link is dynamic.) For any other site, just google "is xxxxx down?" Sprint is also down a lot. What a great country.

Active rigs:

	12/9/2014	12/09/2013	12/09/2012	12/09/2011	12/09/2010
Active Rigs	191	193	181	200	165

RBN Energy: making sense of forward natural gas markets.

From The National Interest: OPEC faces an insurgency, not a price war. (In fact, it may be worse than they think; that will be in a stand-alone post that should get the attention of some folks. Stay tuned.) The linked article is very, very good; I'm not going to provide snippets like I usually do, but I am going to save it. It's a nice analysis. But what bothers me is that "Libya" keeps popping up. Libya is popping up so many times in so many stories it means one of two things: analysts are in-bred and keep repeating what others have said (most likely); or, in closed door, off-the-record meetings, anonymous spokesmen for Saudi have let it be known that their country is in a war with terrorists in the Mideast, including Libya, and that's what the euphemism "market share" is all about. My two cents worth. That and $1.89 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Kuwait Petroleum: $65 oil for six months.

From Finance-InPlay:

Baytex Energy Trust announces 2015 budget and change to dividends : Co announces that its Board of Directors has approved a 2015 capital budget of $575 to $650 million, which is designed to generate average production of 88,000 to 92,000 boe/d for 2015 after planned non-core asset sales of approximately 1,000 boe/d.

• The Board of Directors has also approved a revised dividend level of $0.10 per share per month, down from $0.24 per share per month, currently. 
• Commentary: "Given the recent collapse in world oil prices, we believe our 2015 budget strikes the right balance between preserving our operational momentum in delivering organic production growth and managing our dividends prudently to maintain strong levels of financial liquidity."

Job health insurance costs rising faster than wages. CNBC is reporting.  By the way, "Gruber" is "testifying" in Congress today; actually he's listening to his stellar reputation being defiled. By the way, most of ObamaCare was delayed, deferred, or waived until 2015 or 2016. Employees/employers haven't even begun to see how much this is going to cost them.

The only reason I'm linking this article is because it is the first time I have ever seen a nice photograph of the Bakken published by The New York Times. Oil has made it possible for North Dakota farmers to afford to farm again. I did not read the article, and doubt that I will.

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The Olympics

US News is reporting

The current U.N. climate talks will be the first to neutralize all the greenhouse gas pollution they generate, offset by host country Peru's protection of forest at three different reserves, organizers say.

Now the bad news: The Lima conference is expected to have the biggest carbon footprint of any U.N. climate meeting measured to date.

At more than 50,000 metric tons of carfb/phbon dioxide, the negotiations' burden on global warming will be about 1 1/2 times the norm.

The venue is one big reason. It had to be built.

Eleven football fields of temporary structures arose for the 13-day negotiations from what three months ago was an empty field behind Peru's army's headquarters. Concrete was laid, plumbing installed, components flown in from as far as France and Brazil.

Just wait until China hosts the meeting in 2035. This movement will soon overtake the Olympics in size and relevancy.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Several books need to be read side-by-side, in bits and pieces:

• Shakepeare's plays, particularly the history plays, and even more particularly, Richard II
• Brenda James' The Truth Will Out: Unmasking The Real Shakespeare
• Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Today, just a bit of trivia. From Brenda James, p. 248:

However, Neville never lost his commercial acumen either. As late as 1614 we find him mapping out a trade route between England and India, envisaging a passage through Persia, up the Volga, then overland to the Baltic States and into Archangel, where English ships were habitually moored.

I vaguely recall having seen Archangel in print somewhere before. And then I recalled. Very early in Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, "Letter II" in volume I, written by the adventurer "Robert Walton" was written in the seaport of Archangel.

From wiki:

Arkhangelsk, sometimes Archangel, is a city and the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast, in the north of European Russia. 

I was always intrigued by, and and always wondered why Mary Shelley had picked Archangel. It was obviously a location that her readers would have known very, very well, even if American readers did not.  It was a well-known seaport during the Elizabethan/Shakespearean era and it regained some importance again during the 19th century (and was probably in the news) when Mary was writing Frankenstein.

It is interesting that the Baltic States and Russia are back in the news. This little bit of Shakespeare - Mary Shelley - Frankenstein trivia brought me to Kaliningrad Oblast which might figure in "our" own news in the not-too-distant future. See wiki.