Free Republic

::Tonight:: Wallace Bruschweiler at the Met Club! - When? Thursday, June 22, 2017! Doors: 6:30pm - Where? The Metropolitan Republican Club – 122 E. 83rd Street, New York, NY 10028 Another day another Attack in Europe...yet again.This time a failed terrorist attack in Brussels. And Now the New York City Council wants to require the NYPD to issue reports on what kinds of spy equipment police use — such as license-plate readers, cellphone trackers and X-ray vans used to peer through walls — as well how the department stores and protects private information collected. Mr. Bruschweiler will be joining us...

Venezuela. Syria. Russia. Iran. Libya. Iraq. Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia. Israel. All of these countries have one thing in common. They're all a part of a global war being waged by the United States. To some, the war is one of nation building and global dominance, to others it's a life or death battle for the greater good. On the global chessboard, there are three major players. The United States, Russia and China. All of the other players are nothing more than pawns. This game has been playing out for decades, but it can only have one winner. To better understand...

The US establishment's geopolitical strategy to reform and neutralize the Middle East has been ongoing since the first Bush Administration. If you thought they would let Donald Trump throw a wrench into their gears, you were wrong. It serves America's national security and global interests to disarm the unfriendly Islamic powers in the Middle East, and the arguments in favour of keeping the status quo intact are convincing. There's also a lot more to it than that, which is why the foreign policies of both Democrats and Republicans have been essentially identical over the past forty years. Under the Obama...

The outgoing U.S. Barack Obama Administration and its supporters embarked on a campaign to traduce and challenge the incoming Administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump in the hope that it would find it difficult to govern effectively. This may be unprecedented in U.S. history, and could, to the degree that it succeeds, have an impact on U.S. strategic capabilities, actions, and alliances going forward. No departing U.S. president had gone to such lengths to use the pulpit of the Presidency to discredit an incoming President or presidential candidate as the lengths to which went Obama with Trump. The result was,...

Just when western oil majors started resuming investments in Iran’s oil and gas after the lifting of the sanctions, the election victory of Donald Trump – who has spoken against the nuclear deal that led to lifting of said sanctions – may make international oil companies rethink their enthusiasm in bidding in Iran’s new oil and gas contract tenders. Last month, Iran invited international E&P companies to start pre-qualifying for bidding under the new petroleum contract models approved in September. But in March of this year, Trump said in a speech addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “My number-one...

Saudi Arabia Is Buying Up America's Oil Assets Saudi Arabia is quietly amassing quite a portfolio of American energy assets. State-owned Saudi Aramco is already co-owner, with Royal Dutch Shell , of Motiva, the largest U.S. refinery. Under an already signed agreement, in April 2017, Aramco will take full ownership of the most valuable Motiva assets. Now comes news that Motiva is the leading candidate to purchase the Lyondell Basell Refinery in Houston. This would give Saudi Arabia control of two major Texas refineries proving, once again, that American energy independence is impossible. Qatar Petroleum, along with ExxonMobil and...

New Mexico and Texas oil companies and communities say they will warn Saudi Arabia and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to stop overproduction of oil and lowering prices as a strategy to slow or shut them down, or face import quotas. Independent oil companies with the Panhandle Initiative to Reduce Imports (PIRI) will hold an industry and public rally from 11:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 27, at the Pecos River Village Convention Center, 711 Muscatel Ave., Carlsbad. Lunch and admission are free. Southwest and Rocky Mountain oil producers say they feel they are under OPEC and...

A cargo of 650,000 barrels of crude left the Libyan port of Hariga yesterday, in the eastern part of the conflict-torn country, sparking what promises to be another phase in the conflict as the Islamic-leaning government in Tripoli vows to block the maneuver. This premature attempt at crude oil exports could have huge implications for international efforts to unite the country under the new Government of National Accord (GNA), which was formed with UN support, because eastern Libya is controlled by a government based in Tobruk, which has not yet recognized the GNA of Fayez Serraj.

Leaked documents purport to show that the Islamic State (ISIS) is cutting the salaries of its foreign fighters as low oil prices and continued air strikes on terrorist-controlled oil targets hit back with a monetary jihad. The documents—which are said to have been leaked by the ISIS ‘treasury department’, or the Bayt Mal al-Muslimeen—state that foreign-fighter salaries in Syria have been reduced 50 percent due to “exceptional circumstances,” including continued air strikes of Syria-based ISIS oil operations and low oil prices.

Few meetings ever started with dimmer prospects for success than the recent meeting between Presidents Obama and Putin. The real call for the meeting stemmed from the EU refugee crisis. With a human catastrophe brewing in Europe and the Middle East, EU leaders are urgently demanding that the U.S. and Russia set aside their differences and begin to work together in an effort to resolve the Syrian conflict, the major cause of the massive movement of people seeking sanctuary. Now, U.S./EU leaders are no longer insisting on the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from office as a pre-condition to...

New Mexico has a wealth of energy resources. And now it has a comprehensive plan to help guide development of those riches to grow the state’s economy. Last week at the 2015 Southeastern New Mexico Mayor’s Energy Summit in Carlsbad, Gov. Susana Martinez laid out a broad “all of the above” energy policy. “There is no reason we shouldn’t be an energy leader,” she later told attendees at the eighth annual Domenici Public Policy Conference in Las Cruces. Her plan embraces a wide range of energy sources, ranging from oil and gas to solar, wind and up-and-coming technologies, such as...

Dr. Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy, explains how an oil price war led by Saudi Arabia impacts the prospects for drilling off the N.C. coast

Dr. Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy, discusses the impact of falling oil prices on the domestic energy industry.

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler's new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up...

Saudi Arabia’s unwillingness to follow its longstanding policy of propping up oil prices means North Carolina might have to wait for offshore energy exploration. That’s the assessment of Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy and project leader of a group developing New Mexico’s state energy policy. Fine described a Saudi-led oil “price war” during a presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. In the video clip below, Fine explained how falling oil prices tied to Saudi Arabia’s new policy affect North Carolina’s energy options.

It’s not even 8 a.m. and rush hour is on in northwestern New Mexico. Dozens of big white trucks and water tankers, neon flags flying, head north to the gas patch. I’m driving south, through Aztec, and as I pass the retro-orange A&W on the edge of town, I pull up alongside a drilling rig. The thing’s huge, too huge, it seems, to be rolling along the same road as my little Nissan. Yet the strange, rolling infrastructure has been a familiar site around here for decades — back in 1948, when a UFO purportedly crashed out on a nearby...

I'm going to comment on the ethics of nuking Japan. This is one of those perennial issues that America-bashers constantly raise. There are two extremes we need to avoid: "my country right or wrong," and "blame America first." For me the war has a personal dimension. My late father was a WWII vet who served in the Pacific theater. He was radio operator in the Air Force. His squadron conducted reconnaissance over Japan. He had some interesting stories to tell: i) He trained on B-17s in Alaska, then flew on B-29s in Florida. ii) Our pilots discovered the jet stream....

The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been described as a high-stakes chess game, and Garry Kasparov, world chess champion and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, expressed little confidence in the players yesterday.

The words come as the EU suspends new sanctions - including visa bans and asset freezes - to give peace efforts a chance Vladimir Putin will not be spoken to in the language of ultimatums, a Russian radio station has quoted the Kremlin as saying. Reports suggest German Chancellor Angela Merkel had given him until Wednesday to agree a peace plan over Ukraine or face new sanctions.

The concept that has underpinned the modern geopolitical era is in crisis Libya is in civil war, fundamentalist armies are building a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan's young democracy is on the verge of paralysis. To these troubles are added a resurgence of tensions with Russia and a relationship with China divided between pledges of cooperation and public recrimination. The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis. The search for world order has long been defined almost exclusively by the concepts of Western societies. In the decades following World War II, the...