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August 2017

Two Killed in Finland Stabbing Spree Police shoot, detain man who allegedly stabbed at least eight people in downtown Turku By Zeke Turner

Police in Turku, Finland, shot and detained a man who they allege stabbed at least eight people in the city’s center, killing two. Authorities said it was unclear if it was terrorism.

The attacker was being treated for gunshot wounds, said Stephan Sundqvist, superintendent for the police in Finland’s southwest region. He didn’t name the attacker.

“It might be a terror attack, and it might not be,” said Mr. Sundqvist, describing the rampage in the port town a two-hour drive west of Helsinki. “We won’t speculate about that at this point.”

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was looking into the matter and would be responsible for classifying the incident as a terror attack, Mr. Sundqvist said.

Finnish Interior Minister Paula Risikko said the attacker didn’t appear to be a Finnish national. The police said this was still unconfirmed.

Nordic countries have largely avoided the kind of terror attacks that have struck other European countries such as Germany, France, the U.K. and, this week, Spain. But the Turku stabbings echoed recent attacks that were executed with improvised means and targeted random victims.

At the end of last month, a migrant in Germany allegedly committed a knife attack at a supermarket in Hamburg, killing one person and injuring six.

The largest terror attack in recent years in the Nordic region came in April when a rejected residency applicant from Uzbekistan allegedly plowed a hijacked beer truck into a Stockholm shopping promenade, killing four.

Gilmer: We Should View The Permian Basin As A Permanent Resource David Blackmon

The Permian Basin is a sedimentary basin largely contained in the western part of the U.S. state of Texas and the southeastern part of the U.S. state of New Mexico.

the experts in our industry have historically massively underestimated the resource potential.

Allen Gilmer, chairman and CEO of Drilling Info, speaks at the Hart Energy DUG Eagle Ford Shale conference in San Antonio, Texas. Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg

Allen Gilmer, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at DrillingInfo, Inc., is not a man who minces words, an attribute that has served him well during a long career in the oil and gas industry. When it comes to the Permian Basin and the amount of oil and gas resource contained in it, he becomes positively loquacious.

“We should view the Permian Basin as a permanent resource,” he says, “The Permian is best viewed as a near infinite resource – we will never produce the last drop of economic oil from the Basin.”

No one disputes that the resource in the Permian is huge, but ‘infinite’ is a big word. I asked him to expand on that concept. “That is the practical reality with the amount of resource that is in the ground,” he says, “The research we’ve done indicates that we have at least half a trillion barrels in the Permian at reasonable economics, and it could be as high as 2 trillion barrels. That is, as a practical matter, an infinite amount of resource, and it is something that has huge geopolitical consequence for the United States, in a very good way. It has a huge consequence in terms of GDP, and right now it is creating an American energy global ascendancy.”

Obviously, it is also a practical matter that the pace at which the industry produces the crude resource that underlies the Permian region in multiple formations will be constrained to some extent by commodity prices, costs, infrastructure and other potentially limiting factors. We have seen the Basin go into another boom over the last 12 months despite relatively low prices and, more recently, rapidly rising costs. Gilmer believes that infrastructure will be the most significant constraint going forward.

“The biggest thing that will get in the way of the Permian’s growing to its full potential is infrastructure,” he says, “I’m not sure you can really put any more trucks on that main highway [US 285] that goes up from Fort Stockton to Carlsbad.” He relates a story of a recent trip he and his wife took to Ruidoso, where his family has a home, and sitting at single highway intersection for more than 45 minutes because there was a mile-long backup of mostly oilfield service trucks trying to get through. “That used to be the back road I would take to go home to Ruidoso when I was a kid. Those roads can’t take that – you literally cannot put 50%, or even 20% more traffic on them. So we are reaching infrastructure limits in the basin.”

I had the idea for this interview when I saw Gilmer give a presentation at a conference in April, during which he discussed his view of the Permian, classifying it as America’s “Super Basin.” The data he presents to support his findings was stunning, and compelling. Gilmer says one of the main reasons he’s been giving a series of presentations this year was as a response to the current “Keep it in the Ground” movement coming from the anti-fossil fuel community.

THE EMPIRE IS WEARING WHOLE CLOTH: JULIA GORIN

If Vice President Pence is Trump’s pro-establishment decoy, it’s a stroke of brilliance. Unfortunately, Mr. Pence seemed all too sincere in his remarks to the NATO hopefuls at the Adriatic Charter summit in Montenegro this month. http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/18/the-empire-is-wearing-whole-cloth/

He was on “a tour designed to reassure Eastern Europe of Washington’s commitment to its security despite doubts sowed by President Donald Trump’s lukewarm support for the Western military alliance,” reported Reuters.

The alliance assuring Eastern Europe security is the same NATO that not long ago bombed the region into submission, dismembering Yugoslavia into mono-ethnic statelets that would then need us for defense, and in the process saturated them with Wahhabis–who’d been eagerly awaiting that Islamic Christmas known as Western Intervention.

Now we’re assuring our pawns security. And against whom? Not the jihadists traversing the Bosnia-Kosovo-Sandzak corridor we delivered, but Russia. Which had tried to prevent our stripping away the security and stability in the first place but was too weak in 1999 to defy the new order. And when it tried to contain, via international institutions, the aftermath and breathtaking victor’s justice Washington-Brussels was ramming through, we called it “obstructionist, adversarial, aggressive, imperialist, and Soviet-revivalist.”

No, anyone who has paid attention to the Balkans beyond the start-and-stop cues of the ’90s Clinton media knows it’s not Russia that has “destabilized” the region, as the vice president parroted the Swamp.

In June, Montenegro became the most recent Yugoslav appendage to be recruited by NATO for our encirclement of Russia which, like everyone else in 1991, thought it and the U.S. were heading toward an era of friendship and mutual cooperation against a common global menace, a threat darker than any imaginings of man. Who could have foreseen—especially with 9/11 explaining what’s what—that Washington would instead view the darkness as a stick with which to hit rival powers? And would choose the jihadist over the Russian.

“As you all know, Russia continues to seek to redraw international borders by force,” Pence told the audience of the NATO-snatched: leaders from Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, and Slovenia, along with the NATO-curious: Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. (Indeed, such a mind freak have we pulled on Serbia that it’s considered membership into the NATO mafia that dismembered it.)

“Redrawing international borders by force” is something we started, in Kosovo, incidentally setting a precedent for where Russia has followed suit with less force, more legality, and more national interest than America in Kosovo. Undeterred by history, however, or his audience’s certain grasp of it, Mr. Pence continued without a hint of irony: “I can assure you the United States of America rejects any attempt to use force, threats or intimidation in this region or beyond.”

Richer still, the swamp speaking through Mr. Pence added that Russia was also seeking “to undermine democracies and divide you from each other and from the rest of Europe.” The dividing, of course, had started in 1991, when we backed secessionists in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia undermining constitutional protocols and usurping borders—which was what led to war.

The speech was of a piece with a Wall Street Journal op-ed just days earlier, in which CFR fellow Walter Russell Mead reduced Russian actions in the Balkans to “stirring up trouble,” via its “proxy Serbia” (a term that ignores Serbia’s subservience to virtually every Washington-Brussels diktat in its 20-year struggle to please us). Mentioned nowhere was the trouble-stirring by Washington, London, and Berlin when they designated Albanians as proxies, trained and armed them, and turned a blind eye as they kidnapped, tortured, beheaded, burned, drowned, vivisected, and drew-and-quartered Christian Serbs aged one to 80. This was the macabre list we topped off with the first NATO war that created the first NATO colony out of Serbia’s Jerusalem. Then into the middle of it we plunked Europe’s largest U.S. military base whose name no one knows (Camp Bondsteel).

Surely one can imagine there might be some pushback—maybe even some consequences–to such anti-civilization interventions? The unquantifiable terrorist blowback aside, is it inconceivable that by now Russia—which our barbarism directly has made great again—won’t sit back ala Yeltsin’s yes-man Russia?

But we’re to believe it’s Russia that’s “meddling” in the region, premised on the mantra that Russia acts to reestablish its “historical great-power role.” It couldn’t be, could it, that Russia was at least initially motivated by our common existential need for someone to curtail the chaos into which Washington and its jihadist proxies have plunged the world?

Ah, but by definition there can be nothing genuine in any Russian action, including the impulse to support the region’s Christians we helped cleanse. Why that’s just anti-American. Meanwhile, the by now global Christian-decimation we’ve effected is to be taken at face value as earnest humanitarian intervention.

“The West says Russia is increasingly engaged in the former Yugoslavia,” read the Reuters item on the veep’s trip, “particularly among fellow Orthodox Christians in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia.”

Yes, that nefarious Eastern-Orthodox solidarity that fingers have wagged at since the ’90s while handing the region on a silver platter to the ‘Islamic solidarity’ that fomented the conflicts in the first place. It’s a laugh anyone still asks, “Is the U.S. at war with Islam?” While Islam may be at war with the U.S., the U.S. is at war with Orthodox Christianity.

This explains why we prefer Islamic and Catholic nations despite their historical flirtations with Fascism, while never forgiving the Orthodox their one Communist stupor. Which brings us to the whipped cream and cherry of Mr. Pence’s visit. The vice president hauled out what by now can be called ‘the Estonia punchline,’ telling leaders of NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania they “could count on U.S. support if they faced aggression from Russia,” Reuters paraphrased. One wonders if there’s a WWII Axis sympathizer we’re not ready to die for? As early as 2010, Professor Serge Trifkovic explained, “Former Soviet satellites have…[an] acute psychological need to treat Russia as the enemy…The United States is serious about risking a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, Estonia’s border with Russia.” Sure enough, here we are.

Prof. Trifkovic went on to cite an anecdote: “‘NATO poses no threat to Russia,’ we were told in Lisbon [2010 summit], with which it seeks ‘a true strategic partnership.’…[Dep. Prime Minister] Dmitry Rogozin offered an apt reply: ‘The NATO gamekeepers invite the Russian bear to go hunting rabbits together. The bear doesn’t understand: why do they have bear-hunting rifles?’”

“Russia hates NATO,” Mr. Mead ‘explained’ in his op-ed. On the contrary, it’s NATO that hates Russia. And a “game” is precisely what it is to our oh-so-serious-faced military, intelligence and political leaders. Serbia’s foreign affairs minister Ivica Dacic pointed out that this was the first time the summit was held at the head-of-state level. All to celebrate the latest in-Russia’s-face notch on our belt, Montenegro. And for making the ‘right’ choice, Montenegro was hailed by Mr. Pence as playing “the leading role in advancing stability and security of the Western Balkans.”

But stability is the last thing the Washington puppeteers want in that experimental theater known as the Balkans, lest they lose justification for continued engagement. The U.S. showing leadership where it isn’t needed—in distant Lego Lands where it purports to promote stability but does the opposite–is all part of the game.

Sadly, so hungry for a crumb of unity is our good vice president that he hailed the destructive sanctions bill his boss was forced to sign as a show of solidarity against Russia. In other words, we can’t get the suicidal left to go along with us on jihad, so let’s go along with them on Russia. Now there’s mature statecraft.