Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me -- May 28, 2016

This may one reason why companies are not rushing to "activate" idle rigs. Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

So what’s ahead for crude and gasoline as we head into the summer driving season? Scott Shellady, SVP of Derivatives at TJM Investments, told Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith that he thinks low prices are here to stay.

“The story is lower for a lot longer,” said Shellady. “We’re starting to see some cracks in Saudi Arabia. They might start to unleash more oil on the market… If they really need to start raising some capital and they really start flooding the market, I think that oil up around the $48 to $50 per barrel level is going to be hard to continue.

I expect prices to be around $40 per barrel in August, and I think the new level we’re going to be between is $35 and $50 per barrel.”

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First Mosque In The US Was Built In North Dakota

A reader sent me this New York Times story:

ROSS, N.D. — Richard Omar drove his pickup truck through the cemetery gate and pulled to a stop in sight of the scattered headstones. As he walked toward a low granite monument, his running shoes crunched the dry prairie grass and he tilted forward into an unrelenting west wind.

“These are my parents,” he said beside a carved granite marker. Then he fixed bouquets of fabric flowers into place with metal stakes, hoping they would last until next spring.

Mr. Omar, a retired electrician, was engaged in an act of filial obligation and something larger, as well: the consecration of a piece of American religious history. This cemetery, with the star-crescent symbol on its gate and on many of its gravestones, held the remains of a Muslim community that dated back nearly 120 years. Up a slight hill stood the oldest mosque in the United States.

The original mosque, erected by pioneers from what are now Syria and Lebanon, had been built in 1929. After it fell into disuse and ruin, the descendants of its founders and the Christian friends they had made over the generations raised money to put up a replacement in 2005.

It is a modest square of cinder blocks, perhaps 15 feet on each side, topped with an aluminum dome and minarets. Several hundred yards off the main highway, on the outskirts of a town with barely 200 residents about 60 miles west of Minot, the mosque and cemetery exist much as they always have, surrounded by fields of wheat and corn and grazing lands. In this spot, all the industrial clamor of North Dakota’s fracking boom feels immeasurably distant.

At the sidebar at the right, way down at the bottom, under "Trivia," I have a link to a VOA story about this mosque. It was one of the first links I ever put up on the blog. 

Everyone in Williston, or North Dakota, for that matter, should have a copy of Prairie Peddlers: They Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota in their library. Copyright 2002, authors William C. Sherman, Paul L. Whitney, and John Guerrero is an incredible book on the subject. And yes, there is quite a lot written about the mosque. If you don't have a copy, run, don't walk, to Chuck Wilder's "Books on Broadway," in Williston. Tell him I sent you.