Idle Rambling: Top Stories This Past Week -- July 11, 2020

Note: This is being posted though it is not ready for prime time. It has not been proofread. It is likely that it will be updated. We'll see. 

The most boring thing I do every Saturday is post the top stories for the week. I anticipated that today's exercise was going to be more boring than ever. I couldn't think of any news that was all that exciting. And then I started going through the posts for the past week. Wow, this was a huge week.

How could that be? That going into the exercise I thought I would have trouble finding any stories to make the "top story" list and then was overwhelmed by the number of huge stories that were reported last week.

My hunch is that Covid-19 is simply drowning out everything else. I don't watch the news and yet it seems Covid-19 permeates everything around me.

For example, I had completely forgotten that the numbers for non-manufacturing ISM absolutely crushed the forecast. Absolutely amazing. And that trucking volume soared the week before July 4th: up 45% year-over-year. Amazing.

I had completely forgotten about the federal judge's order to close the DAPL. [Obviously I didn't literally "forget" but it was no longer on my radar scope. Too much other stuff happening.]

I didn't even list the surge in corona cases as a top story this past week. Apparently folks don't understand the nature of epidemics and herd immunity. I do not care about the number of cases. The press seems to care. The politicians seem to care. Except for mandating masks, it doesn't seem the rest of America -- okay, that little microcosm of America I see -- really cares. The alternative: shut down America again. I don't think anyone really wants to do that, but there are warning signs and warnings. Apple re-closed a lot of their stores. I think another draconian lock down would be the death knell for mom-and-pop restaurants, and shopping malls, if the first lock down didn't already do it. We're going to see a lot more stories of cities in huge financial trouble. I wonder if San Bernardino, or whatever city it was in California, is still sending out $500-checks to randomly chosen families?

Going through the top stories this week, and stepping back to try to see the bigger picture, the Tesla surge in share price seems to me to be a bigger story about the legacy auto manufacturing than about Tesla. I've said from the beginning that Tesla is not about cars; it's about batteries. Tesla is a battery company, disguised as an automobile company. It turns out it is also a very, very high-tech company and I think folks are starting to understand that. That startling graphic of Tesla's market cap greater than eight leading automobile companies combined (not including Toyota, by the way) was a bit of fakery. Tesla needs to be compared with Apple, Microsft, and Amazon. The latter three ,with a combined market cap of $5 trillion, dwarfs Tesla's $250 billion.

Internationally, because of Covid, I think, and maybe for a few other reasons, what would normally be the biggest international story is hardly being reported, except on obscure internet sites. The most important international story: Israel starting to take out Iran's nuclear capabilities. The fact that it is occurring (and not being reported) is amazing, but what impresses me most is the timing. Israel realizes it has a small window of opportunity. Israel understands that sanctions on Iran go away if Biden is elected president. The world is distracted by Covid right now. Iran's closest ally, China, has its hands full. Russia, amazingly, is very, very quiet.

Back to the Bakken. I was blown away last week, Monday, when I saw twenty-some permits renewed. I thought it was a one-off. Then Tuesday, twenty-some more. And it continued each day last week. For five consecutive days, more than twenty permits renewed each day, resulting in 118 permits being renewed for the week. The usual number of permits were canceled, about ten if I recall correctly. I really wasn't paying attention to canceled permits. With regard to the renewed permits, Lynn Helms made, perhaps, the dumbest comment about permits. It was so incredibly stupid I did not post it and won't post it now. I did link the Williston Herald story where the comment was reported. When it comes to the ND Bakken he's the most knowledgeable man in the room, so I am clearly missing something.

Much bigger than the DAPL story, by the way, as far as I was concerned, was the announcement that Dominion and Duke were bailing on the $8-billion Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline AND that Dominion was giving away its natural gas assets to Warren Buffett. More on that in a post that will appear later today. It's quite a story.

The PGA seems to be back on course and NASCAR seem to be back on track -- wow, what great puns. LOL. I wasn't even going to note professional sports but how could one pass up those puns? LOL. I said I wasn't going to watch either NASCAR or PAGA because of all the virtue signaling. I lied. Just like the other eighteen million white, heterosexual, MAGA-males who have said the same thing. But they, like me, will all watch professional sports. Last night, NASCAR XFINITY Kentucky race: Austin Cindric, 21 years old, tied a Richard Petty record set back in 1971. And in the post-race interview, nothing was said about nooses or kneeling. Social distancing did not preclude some great bumping on the race track and there just enough spectacular crashes to make it all worthwhile. By the way, that record may be tied, but it will never be broken. 

And finally, the US is either headed into an economic depression like we've never seen before, or Americans are going to thread this needle so perfectly, the recovery will be written about for decades.

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