June 8, 2019 “Sometimes he believed in fantasies such as that the US really had much larger oil reserves than the Middle East. Heroes Paul Johnson

June 8, 2019

“Sometimes he believed in fantasies such as that the US

really had much larger oil reserves than the Middle East.
Heroes

Paul Johnson

He was talking about Ronald Reagan. Johnson, one of the great masters of political prose of the last 50 years, was tactically right when he wrote that. Reagan was strategically right when he said it.

One of my more memorable dialogues with United States Tax Court Judge Carleton Powell – 7 years on trial had to give some pleasurable dialogues – was when I explained to him the difference between reserves in place and recoverable reserves. Reserves in place are like the Maltese Falcon. “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

The tight-lipped, tight-assed New England bankers who ran the whaling business in the late 1850s decided it was time to rake in the big bucks. If you wanted to read at night you had to deal with them. Candles were prohibitively expensive. Plus, there was the risk of considerable collateral damage. Creating the template that OPEC used so well 115 years later, the dudes who less than 2 centuries before were hanging witches – I may be a bit harsh on them. When was the last time you saw witches in Massachusetts? SOBs, si. Witches, no. As bill Bellicheck says, “Do your job.” – said I have the ball and the court. $2 a barrel is now $6. If you don’t like it play your harmonica by the fire place. 3 years later there was no more whale oil business. Scrimshaw tchotchkes rose in price because there was no more scrimshaw.  Whales love it until the Japanese developed a taste for Humpback sushi

Injuns in Pennsylvania long used that smelly black mung oozing out of the ground as the first truly organic homeopathic cure palliative for neuralgia and lumbago. Colonel Drake, a man with a solution in search of a problem, with the solution being that a free man in a free society, a man who is free to fail, “creatively destroyed” the “Let’s harpoon Babar” so much so that the nit-wit Congresswoman form the Bronx tells us we have 12 years to go before the world ends. 

Among the basic rules of economics, rules that Bernie the Bombastic Bolshie and Mayor Pete Bootygoo, the patron saint of Catamites everywhere, inter alia, cannot repeal is the one that says, “If eggs go to $5 a dozen, the rooster lays.”

I fracked my first well in 1974 in Duval County, Texas. That was where LBJ, aided and abetted by his shyster pal Abe Fortas began the journey in 1948 that ended at the Vietnam Wall in DC.

Fracking doesn’t add to reserves in place. It sure as Hell adds to recoverable reserves. Fracking started in 1950. MRIs were around in 1945. Revlamid is the wonder drug for myeloma. When it was known as Thalidomide it was the spawn of the Devil. 

The people who bought Barnes & Noble will use a novel business plan. More autonomy for local managers plus a return to the Mom & Pop atmosphere that Amazon drove out of business. Nothing like a guy backing his plan with his own black chips. No Solyndras here. 

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – I’ve reading books by and about Churchill for at least 65 years. Paul Johnson’s “Churchill’ Is the best first book ever written about him. Plus, it reads superbly well. Speaking of Churchill, I read “The River War” last weekend. No surprises. Gordon is avenged with an emphatic PAID put on an open account. Parts of it reminded me of The Iliad.

“The Death of Stalin” and “Charley Wilson’s War” are two perfect entries for your own film festival.