Month: March 2016

I was struggling to make a living when I first started practicing.  I really didn’t know anyone in Anchorage, other than some guys I’d met studying for the bar exam.  I was hanging in there, still taking those $20 an hour appointments from the federal court to represent criminal defendants.  Finally I got an appointment from the State Court, where the money was quite a bit better, because of a conflict in the Public Defenders Office.  A local black guy named Leroy Hunnicutt was charged with first degree murder in a street shooting on 4th Avenue.  If you’ve seen “The Frozen Ground” with Nicholas Cage, it depicts quite accurately what this part of town was like.

This would be my first felony, and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really know much about the criminal law, not at this level.  I felt like I was over my head.  Leroy was seen shooting Alfonzo by an eyewitness, there were powder marks on his shooting hand, and he’d made a couple of confessions.  He insisted he was innocent, and we had to go to trial.  This did not look promising.

For the state was Gene Cyrus, a misdemeanor prosecutor who was dying to get into the felony division. The only problem was, Gene wasn’t really that bright.  You’d be surprised at how many of them there are.  But Gene wanted this case, which no other felony prosecutor would take.  So a couple of rookies were going at it.

The facts of the case explain its outcome.  After Alfonzo was discharged from Fort Rich, he went back to Alabama for a little while, then returned to Anchorage to begin a career in crime in 4th Avenue.  He ran crooked crap games, sold people crushed Tylenol as cocaine, and tried to get some prostitutes to leave their pimps for him.  He was shot on the streets of 4th Avenue after about three weeks.  He was a man that needed killing.

I was in the court house talking to Wendell Kay, who I only knew by reputation.  He was an Alaskan legend., and this black woman came up to him, and asked him if he thought her son Leroy was going to get an adequate defense.  He assured her he was, and she was relieved.

For you see, this was a show trial.  Leroy was going to be acquitted by the Judge, Seaborn Buckalew, an old time Alaskan, as soon as the prosecution rested.  Leroy was a local boy, who’d been in some trouble but was not a bad man.   Somebody had to kill Alfonzo Green, and Leroy had stepped up.  They wanted to give him a medal.

The only thing that pissed me off about it is that as soon as they released Leroy he went to a lawyer to see if he could sue me for not getting him out on bail.  That seemed like rank ingratitude to me.

The funny thing is, Rex and I have some business to do, if I can get a hold of him.

Breaking news.  I’ve had Fox Business News on mute, so I can keep an eye on COP and the price of oil.  They break in with Trish Regan interviewing the mother of Sean Smith, one of the Benghazi dead.  It was the most effective and damning thing I’ve seen in a very long time.  This woman was well spoken, but highly emotional, and speaking from the heart about how Hillary lied to her about her son’e death, blaming it on a video.  Now Hillary is apparently calling her a liar about all this.  But released emails expose her as the liar, not this grieving mother.

Politically, this seems to me a mortal blow.  This woman’s appearance is something you can’t script.  It’s got to come from the heart.  How it all plays out from here I really don’t know.  But I do know, based on that interview, that the criminal enterprise of Clinton Inc. is over.  Probably sooner rather than later.  Especially after the loss in Michigan, unless the Democrats all want to feel the Bern they need Biden or somebody to step in.

It’s looking more and more like 1920 to me.

Reagan’s team convinced the Saudis to strike an almost fatal blow to the Soviet Union in the early 80’s.  The Saudis had the capacity to flood the world oil market, and they did.  They drove the spot price of crude, at one point, to $8 a barrel.  90% of the Soviets’ hard currency came from oil.  It cost the Saudis $1 to produce a barrel.  I think it cost the Soviets about $12.

Because it lost almost all of its hard currency income, the Soviets could no longer afford to compete with the Western military  build up.  When their campaign to prevent the deployment of Pershing missiles in Western Europe failed, they tried to talk Reagan out of his Star Wars missile defense system.  That failure, added to their ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, meant they had only one option left.  Start a land war in Europe, with their superior ground forces.  That would be insane, and was not considered.  They’d lost the Cold War to Reagan.  Oil beat them, just as it had beaten the Germans twice and the Japanese once before.  The unique, and indispensable,  American contribution to victory in the Second World War was made by our oil industry.

World War One proved that access to a secure supply of oil was a necessary condition of fighting a twentieth century war.  The Germans signed the Armistice on 11-11-18 because their army could no longer function.  It had no oil, and they had no choice.  One of the principal architects of American oil policy in this war was a California oil man named Mark Requa.  He helped win the war.  When I met Babbie, she lived on Requa Road in Piedmont, California, in the biggest house I’d ever been inside.  You can read about all this in Daniel Yergin’s  The Prize.  If you haven’t read it you really don’t understand modern geopolitics.  It’s also a fun read, because Yergin knows how to write.  Take a minute and compare world events with the last 70 years of world oil prices.

Oil bottomed at $27 a barrel, and has crawled back to $37.35 at this moment.  I’m watching it on Fox Business.  COP will track it until people figure out the impact on this particular stock of a Cruz Presidency.  Then it will take off.  The only thing that could go wrong would be a company specific screw up, or a collapse in the price of oil.  I’ve looked at COP’s recent behavior, and it seems to me the people running it know exactly what they’re doing.

So the only real downside to COP is the price of oil, and my ally in driving it up is Vladimir (rhymes with redeemer) Putin.  He’s a world historical figure, as was Vlad the Impaler, and Vladimir the Great, who brought Christianity to Russia in the 10th century.  Putin is having an enormous sculpture of Vladimir the Great erected near the Kremlin. It will be one of the great landmarks of Moscow.  This is the man he wants to be.  Believe it nor not, the former KGB man wants a restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church as a center of Russian culture.  This man, and his country, are not an enemy of the United States.

The United States has no enemies now, except radical Islam, which also poses a serious threat to Russia.  Tocqueville understood 170 years ago that much of world history would depend on the future competition between the United States and Russia.  Our superior political system has allowed us to win that contest. It is now time for a world wide strategic alliance between Russia and the United States.  Since Russia is located in Eurasia, it has many potential rivals, China and Western Europe foremost.  As an island nation, geopolitically speaking, we have none.  Our goal should be to contain China, in a strategic alliance with Russia , Japan and South Korea.

To cement our partnership with the Japanese, we need to open up ANWR in Alaska, get all the oil that everyone thinks is in there piped to  Valdez, and then shipped to Japan and Korea, its natural markets.  This will help free these countries from dependence on the Middle East for energy, and bind them closely to the USA.  Together, the United States, Russia, South Korea and Japan can control the Dragon.  China has always been the Middle Kingdom, largely disinterested in the rest of the world.  That’s changed, but they still have no appetite for conquest.  There’s no reason we all can’t get along.

As for the Germans and the rest of the Western Europeans, they are in long term decline.  At some point they’ll realize the European Union was a colossal mistake, and that each country in Europe needs to reassert it national sovereignty, control its borders and its currency, and advance the interests of its own people.   Until then nothing can be done. I don’t think it’s too late, but it’s the work of a generation.  It may or may not happen.  We should do what we can to encourage it, but never be allowed to be drawn into a conflict with Russia.  Russia is not going to invade as long as it has a long term strategic alliance with us, so NATO is a useless relic.

Russia is now a dominant force in the Middle East.  What Putin’s up to, I have no idea.  But I know what he wants. He wants to jack up the price of oil, as does every other country in the Middle East.  He’s clever and ruthless.  He needs to convince the Saudis, the swing producer, to cut production.

I think he figures it out, so, long term, I’m an oil bull.

I’ll put a floor under COP, and be done with it.  Babbie and I going to have things to do together.

COP opened up 88 cents, or 2.28%.  Now it’s drifted back.  Could be short covering or  just day traders.

When I got up at two I was 175-86.  When I got done blogging I was 207-98, danger zone, but no symptoms.  My heart is fine, and I’m not feeling dizzy.  I ate a big breakfast, took another  Xanex, and I’m down to 145-77, just fine.  Now I’ve taken Lisinopril, and lay down.

I’m up at 8:30, and I’m at 156-81.  Acceptable.   After dipping into negative territory, COP is again up, right where it was at the open.  It’s withstood some profit taking, it seems to me.  Pretty heavy volume.  So far, so good.  COP is outperforming the market.  Crude is up.  Exxon is up the same percentage as COP, so all this has nothing to do with Idaho or Alaska caucus results.  It seems to me the word has not spread.  COP is not yet a proxy for a Cruz win.

I’m not suffering delusions of grandeur.  I’m following a trade.  I have 519 people who’ve signed up for this blog.  That number bears watching.  If it jumps, the word’s spreading.  What I’m doing is strictly legal.  I’ve never been paid for my work against Hickel and Stevens. (except by Frank Murkowski, the traitor).   I’m not a mercenary.  Babbie has been supporting me by her hard work all these years.  My contribution has been handling her money.

On COP, the battle between bulls and bears rages.