Israel as the next Saudia Arabia?

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, Israel’s unusually large and high-quality shale oil reserves may yield as much oil as all of Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576242420737584278.html

These discoveries are in addition to of Israel’s recently diclosed gas reserves, also anticipated to be vaste.

There are few countries in the world as reality-based as Israel, because Israel has no other choice. It must be reality based in order to survive. This convinces me that Israel will waste  no time in developing these deposits, not only for self-sufficiency but also to gain leverage with the international community. Imagine the political consequences,, if you would, if Europe no longer had to depend upon the Middle East for its oil.

Oh, I wish I could say the same about our own country, rich beyond imagination in oil, gas and coal reserves. In our own country, a far-too-comfortable bourgeoisie entertains unicorn visions of Shangri La-like utopias, unspoiled by any energy development other than windmills and solar panels manufactured in China. The price of these idle visions is steep, as measured by lost jobs, investment capital, trade balances and tax revenues, not to mention military missions to fund our energy needs and keep world energy supplies safe. The self-satisfied American bourgeois elites sleep well, oblivious to the environmental, economic and social disasters inflicted upon our own country and others to satisfy our presumptions of environmental virtue. Not even a record recession (depression?) and all its accompanying miseries is enough to shake our self-satisfied masses from their ut-opium dreams.

The bottom-line is that most of the bad international news that we read about today, from Iraq to Libya, Iran, North Africa, Sudan, Nigeria and world jihadism in general, has to do with the quest for affordable energy. Take away oil as an issue by crashing its price on world markets through oversupply, and most of these issues cited above simply fade away, along with the revenues transfered to countries that use them to fund activities inimical to our prosperity and civilization. Crash the price of fuel, jihadism dies. Crash the price of fuel, the world’s poor and unemployed benefit. Israel gets it, we don’t.

North America enjoys the world’s largest deposits of oil, gas and coal. Europe has recently discovered immense gas deposits that should more-than meet its internal needs. It’s time for our civilization to wake up: we should be developing our own energy resources as a crack pace, if for nothing else than to avoid a world disaster. War and poverty also have environmental consequences.

In a comment to one of BW’s earlier posts, I said that this is America and anyone of sound mind and body can make it in America if they just work hard.  Helen, whose comments add immeasureably to this blog, responded that she wished it were so.  But it is.

Every day hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary Mexicans cross over into America.  They have little education and few skills.  They do not speak English and suffer from whatever handicap being an illegal alien places on them.  They have little but the clothes on their backs.  The majority of them work hard — and succeed.  They succeed so well that they’ve continued to come in the millions.  They keep comingbecause they know that, for all of its faults and for all of the destruction 50 years of liberalism has wrought in America, this is still the land of opportunity, the land where hard work is all that is required to succeed. 

It’s not just Mexicans, or course.  A few weeks ago, I took the depositions of a couple who came here 40 years ago from Italy, with high school educations and little else.  They worked on the east coast as gardeners until they had saved enough to come to California.  Here, they bought a small farm and worked it so successfully that they earned enough to buy other, investment, properties.  Today, they still speak very broken English (they needed a translator for the depositions) but they are multi-millionaires, an American success story.

If people who come from outside the U.S. with little English and little money can succeed here, what possible excuse does anyone born and raised here have?  Who are these people that cannot make it in America? 

To be sure, many Americans do not succeed.  They make bad choices.  They refuse to work hard.  They do not take advantage of the opportunities America gives them.  In some places, they fail for generation after generation.  They do not believe they can succeed.  But why?  How do we reach these people?  How do we break through the generation to generation cycle of failure?

Anyone in America with a sound body and a sound mind who works hard will succeed.  Thousands of legal and illegal aliens prove this every day.  What will it take to get native-born Americans to understand this?  And what will it take to get them to try, to work hard, to prove (to themselves more than anyone else) that they can succeed?