I had dinner with well-known global economist David Hale the other night, and investment guru James Dale Davidson. The conversation was literally all over the map, settling on Ukraine and Romania as two of the brightest prospects for locating brand-new investment opportunities. And Iraq.

David was particularly excited about a small company that has just made a large deal in Iraq - more precisely, the Autonomous Region of Iraqi Kurdistan. “I know the company’s principals and have been watching it for some time” David explained. “It’s selling for $7. This thing is an easy quadruple.”

Here's some good news from America. A Big Oil company - Chevron - is taking legal action against a group of environmentalists for fraud and extortion: aka greenmail. The sums involved are eyewatering: $19 billion (billion with a B).  Phelim McAleer has the details.

It's fitting that Phelim McAleer should be reporting this story because, of course, he visited similar territory in his documentary FrackNation. Like Crude, Josh Fox's anti-fracking movie Gasland was feted at Sundance and lauded by the usual Hollywood suspects.

The polite explanation for what's going on here is "noble cause corruption." You'll lie, you'll fiddle with the data, you'll bully, you'll smear, you'll abandon the scientific method -- not because you're a bad person (or so you persuade yourself) but because you're a person so good that you're even prepared to sacrifice even your personal integrity for the higher cause of saving the world from The Greatest Threat It Has Ever Known.

Finally -- finally! -- business has begun fighting back.  And Chevron's case is really good.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, failed fifth-grade math last week. The question he failed is:

If X (government spending) is growing faster than A (government tax revenue) plus B (new revenue from higher tax rates on ‘the rich'), when will A + B = X?

President Obama met with leaders of left-leaning organizations, including Mr. Van Roekel, to discuss the ‘fiscal cliff' last Tuesday (11/13). After the meeting, Mr. Van Roekel appeared on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show to discuss the budget deficit. Mr. Van Roekel told Mr. Cavuto that he had recommended taxing the top 2 percent more to deal with the problem.

Mr. Cavuto then correctly explained that taxing the top 2 percent could not solve the problem because even with the increase, spending would still be growing far faster than revenues -- primarily because of entitlement programs.

After some back and forth, Mr. Van Roekel could not identify one item in the budget that he was in favor of cutting and kept insisting the problem could be solved only by taxing the top 2 percent, even though Mr. Cavuto again correctly and clearly explained that even taxing the top 2 percent at a 100 percent rate would not produce enough revenue because entitlements are growing faster than the economy.

Mr. Van Roekel appeared to be unable to grasp this rather simple concept.

Global warming has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this.

Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don't know what I am talking about, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realized that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of global warming. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows an entire article on the net benefits of global warming.

Last Friday (11/09), President Obama said, "We can't just cut our way to prosperity. If we are serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes."

Mr. President, with all due respect, you continue to be wrong on both assertions.

The president and many of his Keynesian supporters believe that the reason we are having slow growth and very little job creation is because of a lack of sufficient demand. This is why they passed their $833 billion stimulus bill and have promoted other big-spending projects.

These endeavors have not worked -- and will not work -- because they have misdiagnosed the problem. The real problem is malinvestment.

An excellent explanation of specifically how financial regulations misallocate resources, reduce the level of investment, undermine good management practices and increase the risk to the entire financial system can be found in a new book by John A. Allison, former chairman and CEO of BB&T (the ninth-largest financial company in the United States), entitled "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope".