Creation Science, oil drilling, naked shorts and constitutionally protected stock fraud
I once – unfairly perhaps – questioned what passes as mainstream conservative thinking as anti-scientific. The real target was greenhouse gas denial where the debate has gone (a) the greenhouse effect is not real to (b) yes – it is but it not caused by humans and then it will go to (c) but we can’t do anything about it anyway. I figured (fairly) that if you deny the science you wind up getting counted out of the debate. The “conservative” line was a fast-track to irrelevancy.
The reason why my criticism was unfair was that I used “creation science”, a realm of pure science denial, as a club to beat conservatives with. And I was rightly pulled up.
However I had what was – in my view – a market test of whether creation science was garbage. And that was that there were plenty of oil companies spending cumulatively billions of dollars on oil exploration using methods of finding oil (eg fossils of seeds and weeds) that were consistent with evolution and inconsistent with creation science. However I could find nobody who spent even a few million drilling for oil based on creation science.
This blog however corrects its mistakes. There is a serious oil company that does drill based on biblical texts and creation science. I was plain wrong.
So I give you one of the promotional websites of an oil company (Zion Oil and Gas) with a market cap of about $100 million.
And – just because these things should not go to waste – I give you one of their many YouTube promotional videos. In that video they got to ring a stock exchange opening bell. Creation Science is – it seems – at the heart of American Capitalism.
This ungodly liberal with his own creation myth (evolution) stands corrected.
John
PS. Don’t bother looking – you can’t short the stock. There are no securities available to borrow – and naked short selling – that just isn’t allowed.
If you need to know who is behind this then Mother Jones started the work, and Richard Bartholomew nailed it. It turns out that it is promoted in religious publications by the well known preacher and Christian Zionist Hal Lindsey who does not dislcose his family's substantial holdings.
I will refrain from again making a case for naked shorting because I can't see any real social benefit in aggressive hedge fund managers sharing when Hal Lindsey fleeces his flock. We can keep the losses in the fundamentalist family without any major social detriment.
And on this - I pity the SEC. If the promoters hold the belief in oil in Israel as true religious belief it will be very hard for the SEC to go after them. Even if this is as transparent a scam as Mother Jones thinks it will be hard to prove. Did the Founding Fathers mean to constitutionally protect stock fraud?
Read more at John Hempton's Weblog
why did god tell moses to make a right and end up in israel which has no oil. god could have just as well told moses to go straight where the israelites would have ended up to what is now saudi arabia with all that oil?
meanwhile, back on earth dealing with people with earthly desires such as old-fashioned colonial greed and thievery you learn that "the military invasion of the gaza strip by israeli forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves" found in palestinian waters. LINK
June 22, 2009 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
All naked short-selling does is drive the price down sooner (assuming the shorts are correct and the company is headed for disaster) and allow negative thinking to profit. Nothing necessarily wrong about being a contrarian in the market in general or re particular stocks. But market manipulation is problematic in general.
June 22, 2009 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
"But market manipulation is problematic in general."
As is giving market manipulators a soapbox from which to defend market manipulation. As is giving them a second chance, after such defenses fall flat, to endear themselves to an audience with "look at the silly religious people" anecdotes, sure to please said audience and soften them up for the next serving of bullshit spin.
June 22, 2009 6:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess so.... but I'm not clear on what that means here.
June 24, 2009 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
John, please! Religious nutters are clinically insane. We all know that. But there are so many of them, it's impractical to store them all in padded cells and keep them sedated. Think of the cost in drugs! So we have mutually agreed to pretend they are sane. The logic us that as long as their damage is to themselves, let them have their delusions.
What is unacceptable is when they attempt to turn their silliness into public law, as the Bushies did with inflicting various forms Sharia-lite. Feed them faith, and they will vote against their economic self interest, no problem.
I do agree that it would be both just and amusing to throw these ripoff artists into the slammer where any secular criminal would wind up.
June 22, 2009 11:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
...oops... the logic is
June 22, 2009 11:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will point out that this is still not really based in "creation science". It is based in Biblical prophecy, but it is not based on predictions predicated by a young earth and a worldwide flood or something of that nature. The video references geologic ages when deciding where (depth-wise) they are going to try drilling.
June 23, 2009 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink