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Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by The E   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 5:24 am

The E
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My reading comprehension is fine.


TFLYTSNBN wrote:It is plausible that the US might enable massive exports which would equalize prices with the rest of the world. However; it is difficult to imagine a Democrat or Republican administration telling Americans that they will have to pay $10 per gallon for rationed gasoline and high unemployment so that Europeans can have gas.


Here you claim, without factual basis, that US restrictions on oil exports would, somehow, have an impact on EU fuel prices.

As far as I can tell, this is all coming from one of your morbid fantasies about war in the middle east:
It wouldn't take more than a few hundred missiles to take out Iran and Saudi Arabian as well as all other gulf states' oil production on a nearly permament basis. Russia might even launch such a missile strike to eliminate competition before their oil industry is destroyed. The reduced foreign production will restore the economic viability of the US Frakking industry which will very quickly reconstitute production. Restrictions on exports will enable America to enjoy the economic benefits of $30-$40 per barrel plus dirt cheap natural gas while the rest of the world is paying $100-$200 per barrel.


None of that has happened. Little of it is likely to.

Hey, I have an idea for you, TFLY: Why don't you enter the "having terrible ideas for money" club like that Zeihan guy you're so fond of? Just think of the money you could make by telling people like yourself things they want to hear! By making these posts, you are literally throwing money away.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by Arol   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 6:03 am

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:If you review my previous posts, you will find that my comments about America sharing oil are predicated on a few certain or at least plausible events.

Because oil prices have imploded and storage capacity is running out, almost everyone has an incentive to cease production. The only obvious exception is Russia. If they stop pumping from their welllss in Siberia, they will freeze solid. The wells will have to be redrilled.

Saudi Arabia can stop and start pumping without damaging their wells or infrastructure. Saudi Arabia might keep pumping just to force Russia to cease production. Saudi and Kuwaiti production costs are the lowest in the world. Siberia is more expensive than America's hydraulic fracturing. Saudi will continue to produce enough to put Russia out of business. It will take years and hundreds of billions to restore Russian production.

The low oil prices are making it impossible for Iran to sell oil in violation of sanctions.

Both Iran and Russia have an overwhelming motive to destroy Saudi oil production to regain market and restore price. The US has no incentive to protect Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

If Russian oil Wells become inoperable and Saudi, Kuwait, Iranian and other Gulf states oil industry is destroyed by a war, then 35 million barrels per day are gone from the world market. It will take only a few months to consume the oil glut in storage. Then the price soars

There does seem to be a lot of “ifs” in your prognostications FLY!
“If” China and Russia goes to war over Chinas attempt to grab Russian Siberia!
“If” the Russian oil wells freeze up!
“If” Iran and the Saudi’s go to war, thereby laying waste to the Mid-East oil facilities!
“If” the United States fails to honor its treaty obligation with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait!
“If” as a result Europe is reduced to starvation and penury!
If your prognostications hold true, then in your starry eyes a greater United States of America will arise! Stronger and more vibrant, standing tall upon the bodies of the dead and dying; many of them fellow Americans, victims of the coronavirus!
What a dreary future you paint.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by n7axw   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 10:28 am

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Arol wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:If you review my previous posts, you will find that my comments about America sharing oil are predicated on a few certain or at least plausible events.

Because oil prices have imploded and storage capacity is running out, almost everyone has an incentive to cease production. The only obvious exception is Russia. If they stop pumping from their welllss in Siberia, they will freeze solid. The wells will have to be redrilled.

Saudi Arabia can stop and start pumping without damaging their wells or infrastructure. Saudi Arabia might keep pumping just to force Russia to cease production. Saudi and Kuwaiti production costs are the lowest in the world. Siberia is more expensive than America's hydraulic fracturing. Saudi will continue to produce enough to put Russia out of business. It will take years and hundreds of billions to restore Russian production.

The low oil prices are making it impossible for Iran to sell oil in violation of sanctions.

Both Iran and Russia have an overwhelming motive to destroy Saudi oil production to regain market and restore price. The US has no incentive to protect Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

If Russian oil Wells become inoperable and Saudi, Kuwait, Iranian and other Gulf states oil industry is destroyed by a war, then 35 million barrels per day are gone from the world market. It will take only a few months to consume the oil glut in storage. Then the price soars

There does seem to be a lot of “ifs” in your prognostications FLY!
“If” China and Russia goes to war over Chinas attempt to grab Russian Siberia!
“If” the Russian oil wells freeze up!
“If” Iran and the Saudi’s go to war, thereby laying waste to the Mid-East oil facilities!
“If” the United States fails to honor its treaty obligation with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait!
“If” as a result Europe is reduced to starvation and penury!
If your prognostications hold true, then in your starry eyes a greater United States of America will arise! Stronger and more vibrant, standing tall upon the bodies of the dead and dying; many of them fellow Americans, victims of the coronavirus!
What a dreary future you paint.


Wonder how he will pronosticate if we manage to come up with a president who understands that we need to be responsible citizens of the world...That would be interesting, wouldn't it...

Don

-
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 1:48 pm

TFLYTSNBN

Arol wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:If you review my previous posts, you will find that my comments about America sharing oil are predicated on a few certain or at least plausible events.

Because oil prices have imploded and storage capacity is running out, almost everyone has an incentive to cease production. The only obvious exception is Russia. If they stop pumping from their welllss in Siberia, they will freeze solid. The wells will have to be redrilled.

Saudi Arabia can stop and start pumping without damaging their wells or infrastructure. Saudi Arabia might keep pumping just to force Russia to cease production. Saudi and Kuwaiti production costs are the lowest in the world. Siberia is more expensive than America's hydraulic fracturing. Saudi will continue to produce enough to put Russia out of business. It will take years and hundreds of billions to restore Russian production.

The low oil prices are making it impossible for Iran to sell oil in violation of sanctions.

Both Iran and Russia have an overwhelming motive to destroy Saudi oil production to regain market and restore price. The US has no incentive to protect Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

If Russian oil Wells become inoperable and Saudi, Kuwait, Iranian and other Gulf states oil industry is destroyed by a war, then 35 million barrels per day are gone from the world market. It will take only a few months to consume the oil glut in storage. Then the price soars

There does seem to be a lot of “ifs” in your prognostications FLY!
“If” China and Russia goes to war over Chinas attempt to grab Russian Siberia!
“If” the Russian oil wells freeze up!
“If” Iran and the Saudi’s go to war, thereby laying waste to the Mid-East oil facilities!
“If” the United States fails to honor its treaty obligation with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait!
“If” as a result Europe is reduced to starvation and penury!
If your prognostications hold true, then in your starry eyes a greater United States of America will arise! Stronger and more vibrant, standing tall upon the bodies of the dead and dying; many of them fellow Americans, victims of the coronavirus!
What a dreary future you paint.


What treaty obligations does the United States have with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf States?

WTF makes you think that the United States has a moral obligation or "duty to protect" any other nations on the planet?

Just FYI, opinion polls reveal that while the vast majority of citizens in European NATO countries believe that the US should act to protect any member that is invaded by Russia, the majority believe that their own country should not act go protect their neighbors. Can you spell "hypocrisy?"

I don't project a gleeful future for the US wrought by the Coronavirus. The most plausible scenario is that the world has failed to contain the infection. The Chinavirus will run rampant in South America and Africa over the next six months before reasserting itself in the Northern hemisphere next October. We are exceedingly unlikely to have an effective vaccine. When the Coronavirus returns to Europe, Asia and North America, the number of infections will be over one Billion, not 2 million. Multiply your death tolls by two or three orders of magnitude. It will kill some 5 to 25 million Americans. Most will be elderly, but many will be younger. Even the survivors are like to have compromised pulmonary and cardiac systems.

Eurotrash will of course will be blaming Donald Trump rather than China.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by gcomeau   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:07 pm

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In the meantime... actual studies with semi decent patient numbers beginning to report on hydroxy chloroquine

https://apnews.com/a5077c7227b8eb8b0dc2 ... DO-I6sMJyU

More deaths, no benefit from malaria drug in VA virus study

A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday.


About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.

Researchers did not track side effects, but noted hints that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death.

Earlier this month, scientists in Brazil stopped part of a hydroxychloroquine study after heart rhythm problems developed in one-quarter of people given the higher of two doses being tested.

...


Notice Trump has finally shut his mouth about this drug recently.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by The E   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:26 pm

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:The Chinavirus will run rampant in South America and Africa over the next six months before reasserting itself in the Northern hemisphere next October. We are exceedingly unlikely to have an effective vaccine. When the Coronavirus returns to Europe, Asia and North America, the number of infections will be over one Billion, not 2 million. Multiply your death tolls by two or three orders of magnitude. It will kill some 5 to 25 million Americans. Most will be elderly, but many will be younger. Even the survivors are like to have compromised pulmonary and cardiac systems.

Eurotrash will of course will be blaming Donald Trump rather than China.


That depends entirely on whether or not Trump helps or hinders the process of containing and treating the disease.
Since he's firmly in the "hinder" camp, unlike the PRC....

Also, you're truly desperate for some real "end-of-the-world" scenarios, aren't you. "Millions of dead", yeah right. Not gonna happen. A vaccine "exceedingly unlikely", sure. There are several candidate vaccines going into clinical trials right now, labs all over the world are working on them. "Exceedingly unlikely" to not be found, maybe.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by n7axw   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:49 pm

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I'm blaming Donald Trump rather than China. The travel bans were the right thing to do, of course. But otherwise everything he has been involved in has been completely muddled and incoherent. He managed to buy time with the Asia ban. But then, instead of using the time he bought to declare an emergency, bringing in the war production act to ramp up the production or acquisition of the testing supplies, ppes, masks and ventilators, he dithered. When he started the press briefings, he turned it into a political infomercial and then got upset when people like Fauci contradicted his happy talk by introducing reality to the discussion.

The point is for Trump, I don't think it is about saving lives. It's about what makes him look good. It's about the election. I no longer watch his pressers. They are a waste of time. I've shifted over to watching Andrew Cuomo who is a competent governor who knows what he is talking about and explains what is going on in a cogent way.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by The E   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 4:17 pm

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Blaming China for COVID is useless, about as useless as blaming the US for HIV or Mexico for H1N1 or France for the spanish flu. New infectious diseases can appear anywhere, at any time; this time, it happened in China. Next time, it may be the US, or Canada, or Britain, or literally any country on Earth; To demand that we blame a country for the misdeeds of a virus that dared jump to humans is stupid.
(Which, of course, makes it an appealing idea to TFLY)
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 5:32 pm

TFLYTSNBN

Just to further provoke anger because you people are incapable of thought, I will pass on this latest from Ziehan:



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Oil: The Storm Before the Really Big Storm
by Peter Zeihan on April 21, 2020
West Texas Intermediate, the oil grade most associated with American production, plunged down to -$40 April 20. You read the right. For a while yesterday, sellers had to pay people forty bucks to take a barrel of crude.

As with any product, the business of oil isn’t a once-and-done. It must be produced, shipped and processed, and then the refined product must be shipped and retailed. What happened April 20 is a bottleneck in that process. Production surged ahead of pipeline shipping capacity, leaving some producers with nowhere to put their crude.

The real kicker is that this is not the “negative prices” outcome I predicted a couple weeks back. “All” the April 20 event was was a single facility in a single country running out of future leased storage capacity for the month of May. The April 20 price crash will happen again in the same place and it will be bigger: June WTI futures contracts are now spazzing, and America’s Cushing oil storage and transport nexus undoubtedly will be actually full by then. But even this is nothing but the warmup for the big show.

That will happen when the world runs out of storage.

Numbers are fuzzy in this corner of global oil markets. In part because everyone classifies and categories their oil storage capacity differently. In part because they should (gasoline storage is functionally different from raw oil storage). In part because some countries don’t share data because they’re lazy or secretive. But no one thinks there’s a whole lot of storage capacity left. Global oversupply of crude right now is over 20mpbd (with 30mbpd seeming to be the “average” guestimate). Most folks in the know are now musing that what storage remains will be filled up completely sometime in May or early-June.

And filled up it will be, because that is the express goal of the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi price war started out as a spat with the Russians over carrying the burden of a production cut. It has since expanded into the Saudis targeting the end markets of every single one of what the Saudis’ consider to be inefficient producers. The Saudis are directly targeting markets previously serviced not just by US shale and Russian, but those serviced by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan and Libya and Iraq and Iran and Malaysia and Indonesia and Mexico and Norway and the United Kingdom and Nigeria and Chad and you get the idea.

As of this morning, there are still at least 24 supertankers carrying at least 50 million barrels of Saudi crude en route to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Most will arrive in May, seeking to fill up as much of what remains of U.S. storage as possible. Similar volumes are in route to Europe and even bigger volumes to Northeast Asia. In most cases the destinations are the transshipment nodes that enable distribution of inland-produced oil to coastal locations: Rotterdam, Suez, Singapore, Korea.

Assuming you’ve got deep pockets, and Saudi Arabia’s are some of the world’s deepest, it isn’t a stupid strategy. If the Saudis can push prices firmly negative, it will absolutely crush many of the world’s energy producers. My back-of-envelope math suggest some 20 million barrels per day of production capacity – one-fifth of global output – will go offline for years. And then Riyadh will have what it wants: the ability to raise prices as much as it wants and to reign supreme over the world of oil for at least several years. (There are still a veritable swarm of flies that will need to be dealt with in that particular ointment, but the Saudi plan seems sure of generating plenty of ointment nonetheless.)


The WTI price crash on April 20 confirms that if the Saudis didn’t realize the potential for their strategy’s explosive success before, they certainly do now. They have no reason to back down.

There are a few producers worthy of callouts.

Canada’s Alberta province has the most to lose. Not only landlocked, it must sell all its oil into the American market that is already so saturated. Its production must be shut in for years.
Venezuela was facing civilizational collapse due to mismanagement before oil prices tanked. As oil is the government’s only remaining income stream, this marks the end of Vene as a country. Its oil will not come back for at least a decade, and even then only if an outside power first physically invades the place to rebuild the country from scratch.
America’s sanctions regime against Iran has been so successful the country isn’t an oil exporter any longer. Its output will absolutely collapse this summer, and the country lacks the funds to bring in foreigners to help restart it or the skills to do the work itself.
Russian fields are in swamps and permafrost. Drilling is only possible during the winter. Any shut-ins means the wells freeze solid, necessitating completely new drilling. Last time this happened it took the Russians nearly 15 years to get production back.
Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are both dependent upon other countries (in some cases, Russia) to transit their crude to market. High production costs plus finicky neighbors equals long-haul shut-ins.
Nigeria is a mess on a good day, and the supermajors who have made Nigerian output possible have steadily moved offshore to get away from the chaos and violence. Once they turn off their wells, they won’t even consider returning until global prices rise to the point that they are once again willing to subject their staff to frequent kidnapping. That’s several years off.
Iraq has been in a state of near civil war for some 15 years. The country is now producing over 4mbpd, the income of which helps hold the place together. Negative prices will remove the “near” from the country’s political condition and (at best) make the place a ward of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

It is also worth noting that the speed that this could all go from head-spinning to head-chopping is intensely short. Right now there’s still a fair amount of spare oil tankers to shuttle about the world. The Saudis have been leasing out every tanker they can find, so before long all the the world’s tankers will be full as well.

Oil has been a panacea for all sorts of inefficient, compromised, and in some cases evil regimes for decades. Huge demand in the West and Northeast Asia allowed a raft of previously insignificant or morally reprehensible leaders and societal situations to effectively print dollars out of the ground and count the industrialized world as a hungry customer. Not anymore. Demand patterns have shifted, the United States is now an exporter of crude oil and products, and the petro-economy that has kept ayatollahs and ideologues afloat is crumbling. Before anyone cheers it’s worth remembering that things will get a lot uglier before they have any hope of improving.

For a good idea as to the flavor of ugly, my new book Disunited Nations has full chapters on three of the world’s most distorted and bizarre oil-based economies: Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Their struggle with the world-to-come is going to be a crazy ride.


Join Peter Zeihan and Melissa Taylor April 30th for an in-depth discussion and presentation on the impact of COVID-19 on global agricultural production and the stability of the world's food supply.


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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Tue Apr 21, 2020 5:47 pm

TFLYTSNBN

Of course none of you Brainiacas know enough about petroleum engineering to understand what shutting in a welcome in an Arctic environment will do to the well, collection and transportation network. Maybe some of you will do some Googling? Zeihan is one of the few prognostiators who knows more about oil than I do. None of you people know anything.

One can make a case that Russia's economy can survive the Coronavirus and the loss of their oil revenue. I disagree. I would be interested in reading cogent arguments that make the point. The most effective strategy for Russia would be to take out Saudi oil production and maybe oil tankers world wide. This has to occur within a few months.


Iran launched a cruise missile strike on the Saudis major transport and processing hub back when European s were still eager to help Iran evade sanctions. How desperate do you think Iran will become now that they can't even give their oil away? The most effective strategy would be to take out Saudi oil production and maybe tankers.

In case any of you idiots didn't notice, President Trump has actually been engaging in diplomacy to resolve the feud between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Maybe it will work.
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