Aubrey McClendon's greed coming to fruition

The post-McClendon Chesapeake Energy looks like a tempting "buy" target precisely because it's still dealing with an overexploration hangover. Of course, as we speak, he's gone from inflating one bubble to another, trying to inflate the spreadsheets of American Energy Partners.

Is he one of the brashest people in a brash energy world? Yes. One of the most creative? Hell, no. 

One of the most "creative"? Of course. If I were an investor, I wouldn't give him a fucking dime, ignoring the allegation that he stole Chesapeake trade secrets.

McClendon's lucky that people don't generally understand the realities of shale gas, and that he either doesn't understand them himself, or he's a very good bullshitter.

Fracked natural gas wells in shale formations come online like the Spindletop oil well gusher of 1901. Then they decline in a dizzying bell curve just 3 years or so later. And, the fracking process doesn't get out that much more gas than otherwise expected.

Oh, fracking does stimulate overall production somewhat. But the biggie is that it rapidly increases the rate of production.

McClendon himself didn't appear to understand this in his Chesapeake salad days. I think he DID understand that in his post-salad days though, and he realized he was SOL unless he could get investors to back what had become a Ponzi scheme.

That said, he had a theoretically clean slate at AEP. And now he's running a Ponzi scheme from ground zero. And, runs twice as many incorporation shell games as the typical energy company or the typical media group.

And, he ripped off the city of Seattle seven years ago, too.

Back to Chesapeake, though.

It either didn't learn its lessons, post-McClendon, or else it's leading lights have decided to carry on the Ponzi scheme on their own. In either case, no sympathy here.

Jimmy Carter: Not a Hillary fan

Dunno about NOW, but the one living Democratic ex-prez without the last name of Clinton absolutely did not support Hillary in 2008.

It's part of a long interview with him and author Jacquelyn Woodson.

Carter talks about his own segregationist father, and how segregation was a tool, among others, to keep people in "ugly boxes."

Here’s a few other excerpts, like this on the Confederate flag:

JC: Also the South Carolina legislators are not voting to take down the flag because they’ve changed their mind about it. They’re voting for it because South Carolina and Charleston are going to suffer severely, economically, if they don’t make the change.

True, I'm sure.

That said, let's not forget that, in 1976, Carter made a play to hold onto what became called "Reagan Democrats," some of whom had been called "Wallace Democrats" four years earlier. Or that he was the first neoliberal Democrat on regulatory and other issues. (Carter started deregulating trucking; Reagan just finished it. Carter started deregulating airlines.)

I don't know that Carter has explicitly repented of his 1970s, let alone 1960s, racial stances. His actions seem to indicate that.

Or this on race relations:

JC: You’re assuming that a white person who believes in the Confederate flag is listening to his black neighbor who doesn’t like it. There’s very little communication on a sensitive subject like that.

Woodson responded that this was because blacks “knew their place.” Carter doesn’t disagree. He presumably accepts Woodson’s “complicated” observation.

Anyway, give the whole thing a read.

TX Progressives talk #SandraBland, race relations, #HERO, more

The Texas Progressive Alliance is always on the side of equality as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff decries the Supreme Court ruling that will force a vote on whether or not to repeal Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance.

Harold Cook explains why the Republicans won't nominate Donald Trump, but won't be able to escape him, either.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos and contributing to Daily Kos never ceases to be amazed by Rick Perry's serial hypocrisy. Have YOU No Decency, Rick Perry?

Socratic Gadfly talks about the Dunning-Kruger effect and why many people think their local race relations are much better than national race relations.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that many people in South Texas do not have clean drinking water.  This should be a scandal, but, as Donald Trump has amply explained, Texas Latinos are nothing but piñatas to republicans.

Ben Hall and Steven Hotze, Ben Hall and Dave Wilson... a lot of prayers got answered for the Houston bigots and homophobes when the Texas Supreme Court ordered the City of Houston to either repeal its equal rights ordinance or put it on the November ballot.  PDiddie at Brains and Eggs knows that we don't need another HERO referendum, but we're going to get one anyway.

With football season fast approaching in Texas, Neil at All People Have Value posted about the NFL's refusal to allow Junior Seau's family to speak at his Hall of Fame induction as Seau's family sues the NFL over his terrible head injuries. Football is unsafe to play at any level. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

=====================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

The Texas Election Law Blog tries to clear up some confusion about resignations and vacancies.

Ex-pat Texan Elise Hu-Stiles documents what it's like to live and have children in Seoul, South Korea.

The TSTA Blog wishes our state leadership cared as much about schools as teachers, parents, and charities do.

Scott Vogel, editor of Houstonia, has some choice words for a couple of readers who objected to an ad showing a multi-racial family.

Tamara Tabo examines the problems of jail surveillance cameras.

Paradise in Hell knows that Texas is great in spite of Rick Perry, not because of him.

Eric Berger geeks out over the pictures from Pluto.

Grits for Breakfast tries to distill some lessons from the Sandra Bland tragedy.

#ClintonEmail takes a "classified" new turn

Some of the emails on the private email server a Morgan Stanley employee Daddy Warbucks created for Hillary Clinton — four, to be precise — have classified information.

This was an inter-agency intelligence inspector who found them, too, not Trey Goudy or other House GOP wingnuts.

Clinton's response?

Blame the Obama administration:

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign released a brief statement on Twitter, saying, “Any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.”

Surreeee....

And, there could be plenty more sparks, if not a full fire. Four emails sounds like small beer, eh? Those four came up in a spot check of just 40 emails. 

That said, this probably isn't all that much of a big deal. Showing that a big government bureaucracy IS indeed a problem at times, the Department of State has been retroactively classifying some of them.

On the PR side, though, we're in another world. Few more nicks for Clinton.

#IronyAlert: Tricky Ricky Perry benefits from the First Amendment

Texas' Third Court of Appeals has said that one of the two criminal charges facing former Gov. Rick Perry over his threats to veto funding for the Public Integrity Unit out of Travis County unless Travis DA Rosemary Lehmberg resigned is unconstitutional.

The court ruled that Texas' coercion of a public servant statute is an unconstitutional limit on a public official's free speech, and therefore that count is dropped.

The state district court that originally heard Team Perry's appeal of the charges had said the statute was constitutional. Special prosecutor Michael McCrum has not yet indicated if he will appeal. And, given that a constitutional issue is involved, if both parties are ready to appeal all the way out, this could eventually land in federal court.

I'm unsure on this ... per this NPR story, Perry at least pushed the edge, but, courts likely do see free-speech concerns, and, on the political side, separation-of-powers issues.

If this holds up, that leaves Perry facing just one misdemeanor, and it's hard to see how McCrum is going to make that stick, because that's largely dependent on the line of reasoning that led to the felony, which was originally two charges.

Friend Perry has more thoughts on the political background and ramifications.

The Dunning-Kruger effect and race relations

The New York Times has a very interesting story about race relations in America.

Two key polling points are the "tells."

First, about 60 percent of Americans, including majorities among both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad, and about 40 percent think they're getting worse.

However, more than 75 percent think they're getting better in their own communities.

Which is just as impossible as everybody in Lake Wobegon being above average, or the Red Queen's multiple impossibilities actually being true.

That's why I mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect. This seems to be the emotional or moral version of that, where most people think they're smarter or more competent than they actually are, expect people are thinking they're more racially enlightened than they may actually be.

Here's the real "tell" on that:

Similarly, only a third thought that most people were comfortable discussing race with someone of another race, but nearly three-quarters said they were comfortable doing so themselves.

Erm, Sure! 

Which is just as impossible as everybody in Lake Woebegon being above average, or the Red Queen's multiple impossibilities actually being true.

And, as for why many people think race relations have gotten worse? The tea partiers have drunk the rebranded Jim Jones Kool-Aid, with the result of this:

Seventy-two percent of blacks said they approved of the way Mr. Obama is handling race relations, compared with 40 percent of whites. …

 The divide, seen in the answers to virtually every question in the poll, was stark when respondents were asked whether they thought most Americans had judged Mr. Obama more harshly because of his race. Eighty percent of blacks said yes, while only 37 percent of whites agreed.

Don’t tell me you’re surprised.

I would suggest those 60 percent of whites (not counting any like me who ding Obama from the left at times) take a test about subconscious bias at Project Implicit.

But, I know they won't.