While quite possibly true, the guy who provided the information to the US diplomat (Sadad al-Husseini) has since said he was misquoted or misunderstood, according to this article He says that he was talking about an unofficial oil in place estimate, not the official reserves (ie recoverable oil), which is the one that really matters. He says he has no problem with that number, and says that while other countries in the middle east have likely inflated their reserves, Saudi Aramco's numbers are reliable. Not sure if I would believe everything he says, but it certainly takes the wind out of this story; an Aramco insider has not confirmed outsiders suspicions.

The placebo effect is an amazing thing, and often can have significant positive results. But I think you're extrapolating its powers too far. There are limits to its impacts, limits that have been mapped out it many studies.

It appears to me that you are making a strawman argument yourself, something along the lines of "Placebos can cure nausea and IBS etc. Placebos can cure anything!". Your base premise is wrong: people don't always heal themselves. Sometimes they do, but not always. There is no reason to believe that just because a placebo can treat IBS as well as a drug or surgery that a placebo could treat, say, cancer as well as a drug or surgery. In fact there are lots of well tested reasons to believe the contrary.

I'm all for more effective placebos. In some cases they can show doctors and pharmaceutical companies how to better deliver actual medicine (for example, the colour of pills affects their effectiveness, for purely psychological reasons). But suggesting that medicines don't do anything, that it's all internal to the patient and we could somehow do away with drugs and just use psychological effects instead, is just wrong.

No one is arguing that placebos don't have an effect, indeed that's what the video is all about. But it is stupid to say that all medicines are no more effective than placebos. It is stupid because unless you are incredibly uninformed, you must know that when they test medicines they test actual drugs against sugar pills, and if the people receiving the actual medicine don't do better than people on the placebo then the pill is a failure. By their very definition, drugs that have gone through medical trials are more effective than placebos.

If you actually believe this and are not just trolling, you are not familiar with anything Goldacre says. Much of his writing relates to homeopathy or "alternative medicine". He has an enormous amount of contempt for those people precisely because they try to convince people that their "medicines" - their placebo pills - are as effective as actual, properly tested drugs. So yes, this video suggests that the placebo effect is able to overpower the effects of certain drugs. But it very obviously does not show that believers always heal themselves by thought alone in modern medicine (or any flaky alternative medicine you care to list). Vitamin pills don't cure AIDS better than anti-retroviral-drugs, no matter how much you believe in them. That very example is the subject of this, a chapter of his book not published originally due to a lawsuit with its subject, Matthias Rath.

Not themselves, the Calgary Police. It's unclear from the article, but it seems the RCMP is investigating because they are at least a separate party, if not a completely neutral one.
I don't think the situation is entirely clear yet. Maybe the police are trying to hush up dirty laundry, or maybe this John Kelly is just a dick making ridiculous, libelous accusations. I live in Calgary, and I've never heard any whisper about police corruption here before. Based on that, I would tend to give the police the benefit of the doubt over Mr Kelly, who to be honest comes off as a little loopy on his websites (here and here). Regardless, this would appear to be a Streisand effect situation, and no matter what the outcome might be seen as a bungled PR move by the Calgary Police.

That's true, and there's a train of thought even within the oil industry that the US should bottle up its production and just use the rest of the world's oil until it really needs it, viewing the whole domestic resource as a sort of strategic petroleum reserve. Many people believe that in 50 years, say, oil will be much more valuable than it is today, and that at today's prices America is getting a bargain on oil imports. And it's not just for the US that such thoughts have been aired; one of the (many) things that Mosaddegh said that agitated the US and Britain was along the lines of "I'll shut our oil in and leave it for future generations to prosper from rather than have you exploit us".

As I try to point out in my first post above, I think it is a stretch to call the government policies most beneficial to oil companies, royalty reductions for certain types of wells, "fat subsidies". But yes, royalty hikes would harm the industry and, at least in the short term, America's energy situation.
On another related point: the profitability of the oil industry is often exaggerated or taken out of context. Specifically, their profit margins are not widely known. While US oil companies do make many billions of dollars of profit, this is on even larger amounts of revenue, as this Congressional Research Service report shows, oil industry profits for the ten largest oil companies in America were on average 8% of revenue, well below many other industries such as banks, drug companies, tech companies and even food companies.
This is because the oil industry requires huge capital investments, all the while paying large royalties and more tax than they make profit. For reasons I believe become clear at that site, the argument that US state and federal governments are not getting their fair cut from the oil industry just doesn't hold water.

I'm trying to explain to you why oil and gas subsidies exist in the US. I can understand that you are upset at what you see as half-hearted support of alternative energy in the country. But when you go off ranting about Reagan, a man that hasn't been in power in 20 years, I think your argument loses some cogency.
In the real world, alternative energy is still not at a stage of development where it can replace fossil fuels in America, least of all solar. Should the government encourage work to get it to the point where it can? Absolutely, although I think assuming it's a technological challenge that can be solved just by throwing tax payer money at it, like the Apollo program was, is simplistic. Apollo, as huge an undertaking as it was, was nowhere near as ambitious as changing how all Americans power their lives.
But at the same time that the government are encouraging development of renewable energy technology, I think they would be unwise not to acknowledge oil and coal's tremendous importance to the lives of its citizens. That acknowledgment makes people like you angry, and I can appreciate that, but in my opinion shitting all over the domestic oil industry is not an intelligent solution to America's energy problems.

Alternative energy sources would absolutely be in America's favor, and I agree that the US government should probably increase its efforts to encourage them.
But the fact is that right now the country and its economy are inextricably linked with oil for transportation and coal for electricity. Right now any disruption to either of those would have serious consequences for the lives of most Americans. In the case of coal, domestic supply is more than enough to satisfy America's demand for many decades, but oil supply is much more vulnerable since so much of it is imported, and some of that comes from places that are unstable or not particularly friendly to the US. That is why the US government thinks supporting the domestic oil industry is a good idea: oil is currently a critical commodity, and encouraging as much domestic production as possible makes that commodity safer.
In the future, should renewables come to play a significant role in America's energy mix, I would expect the government to take similar interest in securing its supply. But at present this is hypothetical - renewable energy is simply not critical to America's economy like oil is. Now you'll probably think this is a chicken and egg situation - that if renewable energy isn't big enough to be critical it won't receive enough help to make it bigger and fossil fuels will continue their dominance out of a kind of "too big to fail" mentality. And I agree, those dynamics are there. But I think righting these imbalances without causing a large disruption in American lives is going to take many years.
I disagree with your implication that renewable sources haven't been widely implemented because they aren't controlled by big oil companies. They haven't been widely implemented because, despite very direct and significant subsidies, they remain more expensive than fossil fuels. BP, Exxon and everyone else don't get "hugely rich" off of solar energy because nobody does: solar energy is not competitive, and if they don't make money off of it, private corporations can't be expected to plow money into it.

Yes, this article is somewhat misleading. First, it's talking about world wide subsidies, which considering most of the world's oil is owned produced by state owned companies is likely a very complicated calculation. This article puts US subsidies at between $15 and $35 billion, numbers that include some very dubious things in there, such as construction of the highway system, the strategic petroleum reserve etc.
What people don't seem to understand is the motivation for US subsidies. The US government wants to encourage as much domestic production as is reasonably possible, and they don't want a government entity to have to produce it (like countries with nationalized oil industries do). The only way to do this, therefore, is to make it more attractive for oil companies to extract oil that would otherwise be uneconomical. "Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid", as the link above calls it, is I believe the main way the US government supports the oil industry.
If these royalties reductions weren't in place, many of the wells in America would simply be uneconomical. The stripper wells mentioned by someone before wouldn't stand a chance, and collectively they account for 18% of US production (according to Wikipedia). Without deep water credits, much of the gulf production would be an economic non starter (and gulf production is about a third of US production). And the overriding thing that people ignore is that 50% of zero is less than 5% of something. If you force a stripper well producing 2 barrels a day to pay a regular royalty, you're not going to bring in more money for the government, you're going to force that well to be plugged and abandoned, and it's probably never going to be economical to redrill it. Both the government and the industry loses.
It is expensive to extract oil in America's increasingly depleted fields, particularly compared to the younger and much larger oil provinces of the middle east and elsewhere. Because of this, the US government grants the oil industry here better incentives than in those countries to try and keep them in America - simply put, they allow the companies to keep more of the oil they produce. Maybe Americans are no longer comfortable with that deal, but they must remember that hiking royalties will significantly lower US production and will necessitate greater imports from unsavory places.

Compare this to this.

Now I didn't do anything as dramatic as RTFA. However, how has the internet changed anything to do with how government should operate? Some things are, and have always been, the jurisdiction of local governments. And other things are, and always will be, the jurisdiction of the federal government. National defense, intrastate transportation, inter and intra national trade regulations, all things that are just as much the job of the Federal government today as they ever were. Are there overlaps and gray areas and give and take? Absolutely, and each level of government's responsibilities shift with time, technology and politics. But how has more information changed the basic breakdown? The Federal government handles the "big picture" and State and local governments handle whatever's left out of that (hazy) definition. I don't see why twitter or facebook or even data.gov are going to change that.

And as the article also says, the price of fuels increased 63% over the period while electricity prices increased only 43%. Also note that it was this increase that spurred the creation of new capacity, including wind farms, which would undoubtedly have been restricted to some degree in a more regulated system. Given that, it is hard to imagine how the price would not have increased more under a regulated system, unless the changes were hidden with subsidies (ie electricity bought with tax or debt) or the operators took reduced profits. And of course now that natural gas prices are back below $4/btu, prices are lower.
Quebec is a completely different situation because 98% of its electricity is generated by hydro-dams - hydro-dams with minimal operating costs but which required massive capital investments over decades that came largely from taxpayers. Even with capital costs factored in, however, hydro power is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and if there were as many rivers in Texas as there are in Quebec you could be sure that electricity prices would reflect that (it is certainly reflected in the prices in other hydro-dominated places, such as British Columbia). It makes no sense to compare Texas to a system dominated by a completely different power regime. Comparing it to something more similar, like, say, California, is a much fairer comparison, and reflects much more favourably on Texas.

California's troubles were caused by botched partial deregulation that provided the opportunity for companies to manipulate the market. Texas, on the other hand, has had much more success deregulating their market, as have other places, such as Alberta. Texan electrical policy is the most successful in the country, particularly when it comes to encouraging wind power. That you would use California's convoluted, more regulated and historically disastrous system to argue against it is quite surprising, as is the fact that some people tagged your logic "insightful".
Further, there is no place in the world with tighter drilling regulations than the Gulf of Mexico, and the rig that exploded and sank was the most advanced you'll find anywhere. Consequently, you're not talking about "regulating" offshore oil, you're talking about banning it, because no amount of regulation would have prevented the current situation. That's an option that I'm sure will be explored going forward, but it does not really apply to your argument, since you're presumably not arguing for an outright banning of windpower anywhere.

But really this is a story you can spin however you like. The loans likely required that the money be spent on a reputable engineering company, of which the country (being a backwards shithole) had none. The big construction companies they do have were likely impossibly ineffective stooges in the government's pocket. If I were handing over a huge wad of money for, say, an improved sewage system, I would feel much more confident that the job was going to get done if it was entrusted to an international company with a track record than some local yahoos that helped get the country's infrastructure in the situation it's in in the first place.

I also think it's unfair to portray the IMF and World Bank as groups out to take advantage of third world countries. Those institutions exist to help those places. They have had a "tough love" attitude in many cases, and they have been advocates of privatization of many government industries as well as balancing government budgets by raising taxes, but only because they ultimately believed these things were better for those countries. Are they wrong? Many people think so. But if you believe so and you're president of some third world country, you obviously have the option of not taking a loan from the IMF. There lies the rub, of course, these countries are usually so sketchy that they can't borrow money from private sources at anything near a reasonable rate. Unfortunately, in international development finance as well as life, beggars can't be choosers.