Thank you for the recommendation, Chernq.

Thank you for a wealth of information, Periol!

I like the gentle Southern way she uses the f word. And I am not sure, but it sounds like she affectionately calls them the Republic#nt Party!

I read that article by John Helmer that Cronetoo posted. This makes for depressing reading, but I hope this is some sort of chess move. Having sacrificed so much in blood and treasure, no outsider is qualified to speak for Russia, of course. President Putin is well aware of the machinations of the “West”, so I hope there is some plan that we are unable to fathom yet.

Hats off to Togo for the Lomé to Ouagadougou  route.

In the spirit of always looking at improving our understanding of this subject, I feel we have not looked at the whole picture.

To create electric power, we still need to burn fossil fuels at the power plant, and there are the losses associated with transmission to the points of use.

Solar and wind have costs associated with the technology that do not make them economically viable. And nuclear have long term risks that are hard to quantify.

This interview that Nima had with Pepe in Hong Kong started out ostensibly as addressing Trump’s latest trade shenanigans. But it turned out to be a master class on Chinese history going back to Deng Xiaoping to the present. Really worth a listen:

Great news about the oil in Burkina Faso.
About the origins of oil, I remember years ago a friend of mine gave me a book to read, by a Russian author, about how oil came to our planet from a collision with an oil containing meteor.
I just searched the internet, Google, Amazon, no luck finding the book.