America’s is presently sitting pretty when it comes to domestic energy production, and a new report suggests our near future will be even better. In its January Short-Term Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) bumped up its forecasts for US oil and gas production. Oil output is set to hit a 43 year high next year, while annual natural gas production is expected to rise to an all-time high for the fifth straight year in 2015. Thanks to fracking, America’s energy position continues to strengthen.

Those celebrating the legalization of pot in Colorado might be disturbed to hear that non-criminal penalties for using pot might increase even as legal barriers fold. Over at The Daily Beast, Andrew Cohen decries one case in which a quadriplegic living in Colorado lost his job for smoking pot, even though he had registered with the state as a medical marijuana user. In general, companies and other institutions are going to want to step in where the government has stepped out, reserving the right to penalize Americans whose use of pot reduces their productivity or their reliability.

Two reports by leading reporters at the country’s best newspapers offer new research on what happened that night at the US mission in Benghazi, but the partisan flack being thrown around in the wake of these new revelations is mostly besides the point.

A new survey in Health Affairs that found a group of 503 surgeons were only able to guess the cost of implantable medical devices 21 percent of the time. This is especially relevant because a lot of health care reforms place their hope in the ability of providers to economize on care on behalf of the patient—many reform ideas include incentives designed to encourage doctors to pass on savings to the patients. But if the doctors themselves don’t know the costs involved, they can’t be expected to make good decisions about price/quality tradeoffs.

Today’s Satanists are not engaged in the worship of evil. What they are engaged in is a classical American exercise: civilizing something that was originally anything but civil.

South Sudan is teetering on the brink of a civil war, but peace talks may be making progress in Ethiopia today, and China may be the one to thank.

Here’s a novel solution to the caregiver crunch accompanying the graying of the West: Some Europeans are sending their elderly relations to nursing homes in other countries where the care is cheaper. Packing the elderly off to other countries might be better than putting them on ice floes, but but it still seems less than ideal for them to be so far from family when they are at their most frail and increasingly debilitated. If any kind of Boomer displacement is necessary to reduce health care costs, it would be much better for the “young old” to go abroad voluntarily and enjoy a good life on the cheap while they are still relatively mobile and independent. Either way, expect a lot more strange stuff like this to appear as the elderly population rises, especially in those countries with the biggest demographic bulges.

California Governor Jerry Brown is entering an election year with one of his biggest pet projects in serious trouble. In November, two court decisions made it considerably more difficult for the state to raise money for the high-speed rail project and tied up the construction in environmental red tape. On its own, this may not pose a serious long-term threat to the program, but public opinion is turning against it as well. If this becomes a hot issue again, it could be one of the few major weakness in Brown’s potential reelection campaign.

Silicon Valley has grown up. Is a “peasants’ revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace” in the offing?

Turkey’s political crisis took a dark turn this week. Photos of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s son meeting a suspected al-Qaeda financier in an Istanbul hotel were leaked to the press. If these reports hold any water, Erdoğan could be in serious trouble.