This is such an incredible insight into the life of government and the impossibility of being able to run a project of that scale in such an environment. Shocking.

I wish the AOC would comment on matters that are of importance to the church, matters that require the CofE to have an opinion. Not ones that do not.

There is not much good in football at the moment. As a follower, rather than being able to watch teams and players on the greatest stages create all that is brilliant about football, more often than not we are subject to destructive egos, ill-discipline and poor referring decisions. All of these detract from the greatness of football and for me at least, defer me to prefer watching rugby where if the same issues are present they are not as apparent. Governing bodies of football really need to sort out these issues and institute change so that not every game or championship is decided equally by footballing ability and poor referring decisions.

There must be an economic case to show that it is in everyone’s interest to invest some time and money into changing the game. Change won’t ruin it.

While S&P’s assessment of US debt has not seemed to have obviously troubled the markets too much, Obama’s loosely optimistic expectation for bipartisan coordination on reigning in the debt is personally troubling. As far as I can tell, the spectre of being a traitor to an ideological line weighs heavier on congressman’s shoulders than does the spectre of vast national debt and the problems it entails. This is clearly evidenced by the last minute budget decision and the seemingly cavalier approach to it. For me, Obama’s tempered optimism is too much. I hope he can rise to the challenge of reigning in congress first, anything else after that will make for light work.

This article caught my eye because of the title, then because of the great cartoon at the top of the page and then because of the interesting and slightly worrying content. 

I just bought Oil 101 by Morgan Downey upon the recommendation of someone recently on the graduate training scheme for Shell. I also bought two other books, In Search Of Excellence: Lessons From America’s Best Run Companies by Thomas Peters and Roger Waterman; Russia 2010 and What It Means For The World by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafsen. The second two books were bought for £0.01 and £2.something for the shipping so absolute bargains; I am reading The Prize by Yergin and enjoying it so I thought I would buy his book on Russia, a very different read I expect but will be useful for understanding how Russia fits into the picture.

I am very excited to read them!!

I had a fantastic day yesterday at the Centre For Global Energy Studies’s seminar on Risk and Opportunity in The Middle East in Belgravia. It was a great day with so many industry experts. I felt a little under-gunned with my industry knowledge but i’m not worried because I was able to hold my ground. Also all the people there are on a payroll of sorts, i’m not, so I was encouraged. Some interesting points coming from the day are:

1. The events in the middle east currently are not as game-changing as the media presents. All the macro players are still in place, subscribing to roughly the same allegiances.

I’m not sure I entirely agree as I feel on the micro scale, communities are now empowered and specifically for the oil and gas industry, this makes working with them effectively a changed game.

2. Iraq has massive reserves that are very important to oil markets and the world economy, however there are many obstacles making their realistic potential seriously diminished.

3. It will take the creation of about 100 million new jobs over the next decade in the Middle East, to help cope with the population bulge and consequent unemployment in the region.

It was a great day and has given me some real insights into the industry.

Thank you Jenni Wilson from the CGES for making it possible for me to go.

Apologies to my devoted followers for the lack of posting in the last few days, it has been very busy moving house and getting my wife’s indefinite leave to remain.

I have the great priviledge of working in an IT department at the moment despite my lack of IT skills. It has been a very fascinating experience and there are two key observations:

1. Everyone moving forward needs to know about IT and the internet as a basic skill

2. The problem solving process needed to solve an IT problem needs to be rigorously simple and methodological to yield a solution. If one takes this means of thinking and applies it to non-IT related problems solutions will be easier to come by. This means also creates a replicable framework so as problem solving need not be haphazard and arbitrary from one problem to the next.

I wonder whether those looking to ignite some form of class warfare/elitist hatred will ever look beyond the aged ‘playing fields of Eton’ jibe at the conservatives.