Part of getting older is losing patience for stupid people. That means losing interest in mass media, particularly the commentariat. These are people who spend all of their time opining about things, but never take the time to fact check themselves. They have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet they can never be bothered to look up basic facts about their topics. Instead they just repeat the same nonsense the other chattering skulls have been saying.

Here’s a good example from John Fund over on National Review. How hard would it be to call someone who knows something about natural gas? They could quickly tell him that it is really hard to ship overseas. They would also tell him we lack the facilities to do it in any sort of volume. It will take decades for us to built out those systems. We have not built a refinery in thirty years. The environmental lobbies will never go along with a large scale LNG facilities near a major port. It’s probably easier to start a nuclear plant than to build a new natural gas facility.

Let’s look at the building of alternative pipelines into Europe. What do you think Russia is doing in Syria and Iran?  They want to build a pipeline through Iran, over northern Iraq into Syria. Tartus would be a very convenient place to build LNG facilities as it already has port facilities capable of handling big sea-going vessels. The GCC and Saudi Arabia would like to build one too, except their pipeline would run through Saudi Arabia into Jordan to the Suez Canal. Neither of these plans will be done anytime soon. Given the problems in the region, both projects are on permanent hold.

Again, all of this stuff can be looked up on-line. Five minutes of time and you quickly see we are not going to be able to do anything about Gazprom. Even if he is unable to work the internet, he works for the Wall Street Journal. he can call people who know about these things. instead, he repeats nonsense. Most likely, the nonsense comes from the neocons who obsess of Russia. They feed these lunkheads in the medial their talking points, knowing that people like Fund will never fact check them.