Charlie Pierce calls them "death funnels" and he's exactly right. He's referring to pipelines designed to transport Alberta Tar Sand, the dirtiest fuel on the planet, to refineries or ports to refineries that can turn it into technically more usable types of oil. It never gets very good, more the type you can lubricate heavy machinery with or burn in a particularly wasteful in the smoggy toxic sense power plant, barely better than coal.

It's basically asphalt, suitable for paving and not much else and it makes as much economic sense as tearing up roads or taking used tires to achieve the same effect, which is to say none at all in the current market where solar and wind are dirt cheap, batteries are getting less expensive by the hour, and fracked oil and natural gas are driving Saudi Arabia into bankruptcy. In fact the only way you don't operate at a loss simply from mining and refinery costs is if the price of crude is well over $70 a barrel. Which it isn't.

But Big Oil has all these sunk costs based on the notion of $100+ Oil and unlike a smart gambler it doesn't understand that the money you've put in the pot isn't yours anymore, it exists in a quantum state only determined at the reveal.

One of the most frustrating things this past week has been watching James Comey make the rounds of Stephanopoulos, Maddow, The View, along with other outlets and be lauded as some paragon of moral rectitude and virtue.

Jim Comey is a lifelong Republican who willingly and enthusiastically signed off on Torture (a War Crime in case you've forgotten) and who, immediately after his oh so so brave and principled stand at the bedside of John Ashcroft, personally approved a barely modified program of blanket electronic surveillance on United States Citizens THAT PERSISTS TO THIS DAY!

Thanks for nothing Barack.

so I'm going for a walk (no snow, thank goodness).

Here's Purfleet contemplating the lack of snow.

Forget Cambridge Analytica. Palantir is the real scandal.

There was a surprisingly good ABC News article about Syria recently, concerning the likely upcoming Syrian government offensive against the remaining rebel enclaves.
The article focuses on Iranian-backed militias coming closer to the Israeli border, and how dangerous that is.