The problem with The Guardian is that it now relies heavily on advertising revenue, hence articles (the sillier the better) as click bait.
There are some good articles from time-to-time though...and some good writers.
My own fav is The Spectator, but I subscribe to quite a few political mags, of both left and right persuasions.
The Spectator is beacon in the darkness: thoughtful and insightful commentry and amongst the best regular contributers from the likes of Taki, Douglas Murray, Steerpike et al. You can't compare the Owen Jones of this world in The Guardian to what The Spectator does. Guido Fawkes (order-order.com) is excellent too and has plenty of updates on what's going on in the world of British politics throughout the day.
The Telegraph has sadly decided to mirror The Guardian with a Daily Mail edge and since they've rebranded themselves have lost it. But I see the number of free articles is increasing again, a sure sign no one is paying for the subscription.
The Times as Doghouse has stated, but I don't know anyone who has paid a subscription. The Financial Times was once superb, but the last time I checked them out that had gone all gushy and left-wing too. And the Economist? Oh dear.
A little birdie tells me he cuts his intel briefings short -- and only attends once a week anyway -- because he resents being told things he doesn't already know, and he gets flustered and confused when he's faced with something that he doesn't understand. He has a pathological fear of ridicule, so he refuses to have complex issues explained to him, because he thinks everyone in the room thinks he's stupid and is secretly laughing at him. So he waves off explanations and says, "I got it," and walks out of the room with no more idea of what's going on than he had when he walked in. He has to be reminded who the leader of ISIS is. He wasn't even in the room during the Yemen raid; he was in the residence. There are also serious questions as to his level of functional literacy.
Scuttlebutt around the office is that he's working to set up his own intelligence team, totally stovepiped and answerable only to him, to cherry-pick intel to back up whatever coke-fueled 3 AM horseshit he and Bannon say is going on in the world. This will be Office of Special Plans redux, only powered by InfoWars and Breitbart. I expect these assholes to employ confirmation bias the way Obi-Wan employs The Force. It should be really fun when they bring their grandiose ideas (I'm thinking our next project will be interning suspected reptilian overlords) to the actual intelligence community, the half-million or so analysts and experts who study the world for a living and inform the very generals whose job it will be to tell the president to fuck himself. Oh, to be in the room.
What a great shame these hard nose generals and intelligence experts were curiously silent and obedient when that great intellectual president, George Bush Jnr, was manipulated into invading and destroying Iraq. Or too when Hillary cajoled Obama to join the French and Brits into reducing Libya to tribal and Islamic chaos. Not to mention the lesser cluster fuck of the Ukraine.
But suddenly, they have grown some balls and strategic grasp and are going to tell the president to "fuck himself" with his grandiose ideas of protecting the borders from illegals and the existential threat of Islamic terror. How very dare he! Oh to be in that room indeed.
The 'NZ' in ANZUS has been missing for a while now, ever since the Kiwis refused to let any USN ships with nuclear reactors dock in their harbours.
As for the refugee deal, I kind of agree, why would the US take people that Australia won't? Surely if they are genuine refugees they should just be settled in australia...
Exactly, but it's purely symbolic and rubbing your noses in the principles of no borders, no frontiers and shiny happy people dancing to REM. They could be mass rapists or psycho-killers, jihadist filth, carriers of antibiotic resistant TB, 40 year old nonces posing as 15 year old schoolboys, but they would still accept them with open arms. Any criminality, terrorist threat or disease will be brushed aside as mere collatoral damage. All immigration/economic migrants/unvetted refugees are good and welcomed. It's the principle of the thing and standing up against the Donald that is important. How very different this response to when Castro flushed his lavatory of criminals into Florida in 1980.
We are resplendent in diversity!
The oil industry is cyclical and as it happens the bottom of this cycle is a full blown depression which has never been experienced in this business sector before. A recovery will come, certainly not in 2017 and IMCO, without black swan events, we are looking at 2019/20 before a full recovery and some of the skill sets will be 2021/22. So it's a case of survival for those in this business sector. Yes, companies will go bust, merge and in the case of Venezeula a whole country has gone tits up. But even here a recovery will come.
Rates have collapsed along with business revenues. In the North Sea alone in 2016, 110,000 jobs were lost in the UK sector. Not much in the news though, the BBC and elsewhere were too busy focusing the 10,000 jobs at risk at TATA Steel.
The national oil companies are generally badly managed, or in the case of The Kingdom over indulgent in largesse. It is not a case of running out of oil (just yet) and Saudi have just had their oil reserves independently audited and agreed, which was a hot topic of debate awhile back. There is some improvement from Venezeula with payments to some of their manufacturers and service providers which had been on hold for most of 2016.
Several slides there on Exxon, they are one of the few oil & gas majors with some significant projects beginning in the second half of 2017 and are in much better shape than most.
One of the others is busy off-shoring all its engineering capacity to India. If you're not Indian you're out as they say. I wisely got rid of all my shares in this bohemoth.
Also when these companies sell-off their assets, such as Shell is in the North Sea. Smaller, more agile oil companies take over and can run these business units at a profit as they have smaller organisations, R&D departments, etc. It's not that the fields are no longer viable.
The one thing that peak oil theory did get right, is that all the very easily accessible with simple technology has been exploited well beyond its peak. So we have deep water fields, high pressure, problems with sour gas, oil sands etc and difficult to get locations in the Arctic. But, there's still plenty of oil yet and technological advancements will make all of these deposits exploitable long term.
