Active Rigs -- July 29, 2019

Wow, everyone is really "hung up" on the number of active rigs in the US. Nothing new here. Just idle rambling on a very, very slow news day. From Energent today:

Summary of Plays 

• Permian Basin: +0.7% to 443 rigs compared to last week's 440 rigs 
• Eagle Ford: -1.5% to 66 rigs compared to last week's 67 rigs 
• Marcellus: -3.4% to 56 rigs compared to last week's 58 rigs 
• Haynesville: stayed flat at 51 rigs 
• Cana Woodford stayed flat at 49 rigs 
• Williston: -14.7% to 47 rigs compared to last week's 55 rigs 
• DJ-Niobrara: +7.4% to 29 rigs compared to last week's 27 rigs 
• Powder River: +4.8% to 22 rigs compared to last week's 21 rigs 
• Utica stayed: -11.8% to 15 rigs compared to last week's 17 rigs 
• Granite Wash: stayed flat at 4 rigs 

Now that I know the difference between the way Baker Hughes counts active rigs and the way the NDIC counts active rigs, following the rig count in the Bakken will be much more interesting.

The news is so slow, I'm going to have to go to reading a book. Good luck to all.

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Censorship

Lots of talk right now about how the US government needs to step in to regulate / censor  companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo.

It would behoove folks to read Chapter 9 in Kevin Birmingham's 2014 The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle James Joyce's Ulysses. At the end of the day, I fear government censorship / regulation more than the companies being threatened.

Chapter 9, "Power and Postage" is all about US censorship --

... the regime that began in earnest in 1873, when Anthony Comstock boarded a train to Washington, DC, with a draft of a new federal law in his pocket and a satchel filled with his dirtiest pornography. Comstock was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and because he understood the power of words, he understood the power of the Post Office. -- p. 111.

The rest is history.

I'm severely limiting my obsession with buying any more books. I've simply run out of shelf space. I've culled (as in "selectively slaughtered") my library, and am trying to be very, very careful on new purchases.

The Birmingham book I'm reading is from the library. It looks like I may end up purchasing this book, along with James Shapiro's Year With Lear.

1873.

I think Hugh Hefner was still fighting the US Post Office as late as 1951 but I'm rusty on the details.