Oklahoma

According to Gallup, America is now fatter than it has ever been before.  But how can this possibly be?  After all, Americans spend an astounding 60 billion dollars a year on weight loss programs and products.  After putting so much time, effort and energy into losing weight, shouldn’t we be some of the healthiest people on the entire planet? 

While it is likely oil prices could get a bit of a bump from a decline in the U.S. dollar, ultimately it will come down to the fundamentals longer term. It is quite clear that the speculative rise in oil prices due to the "fracking miracle" has come to its inglorious, but expected conclusion. What is interesting is that most have not figured out that the same thing will occur with the artificially driven surge in financial markets as well. It is quite apparent the some lessons are simply never learned.

So much for the Saudi and OPEC strategy of putting a dent in US Oil Production by not cutting production and hoping to gain market share for their oil by putting the Shale Industry out of business.

Between 1974 and 2009 there were 62 magnitude 3.0 or stronger earthquakes in Oklahoma. In the past five years there have been 1,070 M3.0+ quakes. The chart of Oklahoma's quake surge correlates perfectly with the amount of wastewater injected into the state. And when it comes to Oklahoma's "induced seismicity" there is nobody more responsible for either Oklahoma's "shale miracle" or the resultant earthquake epidemic than David Chernicky, CEO of Tulsa-based New Dominion.

"We got hammered," Houston's emergency management coordinator Rick Flanagan told CNN, and as the following stunning images show, that is an understatement. "We've seen flooding before, but not nearly to this extreme," said one resident, adding "It rains and it rains and it rains, and there's really nowhere for the water to go... It's ridiculous." Perhaps even more stunningly, as Mashable's Andrew Freeman notes, the floods have been a remarkable turn of events for a region that was still mired in drought as of three weeks ago. That drought, which had affected Texas since 2010, is now effectively over in most areas, as is a long-running drought in Oklahoma. Authorities are still searching for 12 members of two families who went missing over the weekend.

“The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact they vastly outnumbered the opposing force and yet they failed to fight and withdrew from the site...We can give them training, we can give them equipment. We obviously can’t give them the will to fight.”

"Six years after the recession ended, many U.S. states are hard pressed to balance budgets because of a sluggish recovery and their own policy decisions and in fact, thirty-two states faced budget gaps in fiscal 2015 or 2016 or both." Bloomberg reports. Indeed, state and local governments are so broke that "even Republican governors loath to raise taxes have proposed higher levies."

"Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed."

UPDATE: *BOSTON MARATHON BOMBER TSARNAEV SENTENCED TO DEATH

Just over 2 years after the devastating explosions that killed and maimed many during The Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is about to face his penalty. The jury of seven women and five men convicted Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, last month of all 30 charges against him, including 17 counts that carry the death penalty. After 14.5 hours of deliberation, the jury will announce at 3pmET whether he will face death or life in prison.

Despite the government's 'advice' to young debt-laden students, the tragedy of the American farmer continues with worryingly pessimistic views on the future of the industry. With farmland prices falling for the first time in almost 30 years, credit conditions are weakening dramatically and the Kansas City Fed warns that persistently low crop prices and high input costs reduced profit margins and increased concerns about future loan repayment capacity, and JPMorgan concludes, the industry is currently in dire straits with the potential for a liquidity crunch for farmers into 2016.

PetroChina just surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the largest energy company in the world, on a market cap basis. Now the question becomes: can PetroChina retain its status as the world’s largest energy company?

Ever since the mysterious, unexpected bursting of ISIS on the global stage one year ago with much fanfare and even more carefully produced with just the right amount of lighting beheading video clip, we said from the very beginning that entire rehashed sequence of events in the middle east is about one thing: removing Syria's Assad from power just so the nat gas infrastructure from Qatar can traverse the territory and enter Europe, eliminating Russia's energy dominance over the continent. Today we got the latest confirmation of this in an AP report according to which "Turkey and Saudi Arabia have converged on an aggressive new strategy to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad."

As with everything in life, there are winners and losers, and the recent rout in the oil market is no different. The four flip sides below should be closely monitored in the coming months, for the oil market will be impacted by these factors – regardless of if they change their tune, or become a broken record.

Forget about Peak Oil, the new buzzword is Peak Demand.   In short the oil market is a declining business over the next 50 years ....

No matter what other problems may or may not be linked to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly is primarily responsible for the recent spate of earthquakes in Oklahoma, normally a seismologically quiet state. That’s the conclusion of a report issued April 21 by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS). What’s important about Andrews’ and Holland’s conclusion is that they represent the state of Oklahoma, where energy is an important industry, providing about one-quarter of the state’s jobs.