Today is the Texas runoff election. Here is some brief coverage of the races and who I’ll be voting for.
Voting locations:
Today Is The Texas Runoff! Go Vote!
May 24th, 2022Twitter Locks My Account Over Defending My Right To Use Lethal Force In Self-Defense
May 23rd, 2022This is the offending tweet:
Evidently Twitter has decided that mentioning use of lethal force to defend your life and home (legal in all 50 states, but especially in Texas, a castle doctrine state) is forbidden. Or, more likely, the left-wing “duh, you don’t need to worry, because there’s only a 7% chance home invaders will commit violence!” troll reported it as a “threat” and Twitter just automatically suspends accounts over mere reports.
I have appealed.
Hey, can someone forward this to Elon Musk?
Houston Exceeds Its Credit Limit
May 22nd, 2022It sucks when you exceed your credit limit and you can’t buy gas for your car. And “you” in this case means “the City of Houston.”
Late Thursday night, the City of Houston ran into a problem at the pump.
It is best described in a memo obtained by KPRC2 Investigates, sent from HFD dispatch to fire crews citywide about midnight:
“Effective Immediately, all Voyager fuel cards are inoperable until further notice. All units must refuel at a City of Houston fuel site location (attached, or contact OEC for locations). If units receive an invalid odometer reading, they will need to contact Senior Captain XXXXX at 713-XXX-XXXX. The member must be present at the pump for the reset to take place. All members should make themselves aware of their current fuel capacity and consider the possibility of transport distances to Medical Center, etc., especially in morning traffic for outer laying fire stations. This consideration should also be made that this is a citywide issue and HPD, Solid Waste, and other city vehicles may also congest these fueling sites around our shift change. Please pass this information to the oncoming shift and contact your immediate supervisor and/or OEC for critical fuel situations.”
The President of the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association reacted strongly, Friday.
“This is something that nobody should learn about at midnight. Either they didn’t know or they didn’t notify everybody. Somebody needs to be held accountable because there is no do-over in the emergency response business,” President of HPFFA Patrick Lancton said.
We contacted the Mayor’s office for comment, Friday.
Director of Communications Mary Benton responded with the following, noting that the problem was rectified quickly Friday morning.
“Last night, shortly after 10 p.m., Fleet Management began to receive notice that fuel transactions attempted by City employees with Voyager fuel cards were being declined. COH representatives contacted Voyager and learned that due to the recent spike in fuel costs, the City of Houston credit limit under the Voyager program had been exceeded. This resulted in the cards being deactivated without notice to the City.
Someone was asleep at the switch here in not getting the credit limit raised. Though Voyager is evidently a standard fleet card, it does make me wonder what control are in place to prevent fraud and people filling up their own cars or those of others. I knew someone in college whose parents had taken out a gas station card in his name, and he used it as an ATM for filling up other people’s cars in exchange for cash.
It seems like the sort of thing that should receive regular auditing.
China’s Last Year?
May 21st, 2022Peter Zeihan is back with another provocative video (filmed at the Eisenhower Naval School) that suggests that China faces such massive problems that collapse may be imminent. “I see China with not just a demographic failure, but a failure of leadership, a failure of policy, an agricultural failure, and an energy failure, all at the same time. It is
entirely possible that this is the last year of the People’s Republic.”
Some of this (especially the demographic collapse) we’ve covered here before. Takeaways:
The Chinese plan has always been to let the Russians go first, just as a proof of concept. So their thinking was a fast war that conquers Taiwan in a matter of days, that imposes a done deal upon the world, and everyone just sucks it up and takes it, because China is too economically powerful to be challenged. And once you hold the territory, there’s no point in going to a broad scale war against the Chinese when it’s already happened. That’s always been their plan.
Oh my.
With the Russians, they have had every aspect of all of their planning for the last 40 years set on fire and burned to ash in less than a month. So number one it will not be a quick war, because Ukraine was one of the world’s less militarily competent countries in the first place…
I think this statement may have been true in 2014, but I don’t think it was true by the time Russia invaded. Ukraine professionalized and modernized their military with considerable help and guidance from western militaries, and developed a competent officer and NCO core (partially thanks to experience with the low-intensity conflict in Donbas).
…and they’re still holding out against the Russians. Taiwan has been preparing for this war since 1955. Taiwan has a moat. Taiwan has a nuclear program that started in 1974, so if we have a two-month accumulation of Chinese forces getting ready to push, the Taiwanese will see it because this is the only national security question that they pay any attention to, and they will make a nuclear device. And so the only way that the Chinese can even make an attempt on Taiwan is to text all of their soldiers at the same time and just say everyone get to the coast take a fishing boat with your buddies and start moving on Taiwan. They know it is going to cost them a million troops just to get there.
I find this scenario unlikely, and even less likely to succeed.
Russia has many flaws, but they’re a massive producer of food and energy products. If you put the sanctions that we have put against Russia onto China, oh my. China imports 85% of their energy, 85% of that from the Persian Gulf, and they import 85% of inputs that are necessary to grow their food. So you would have an industrial collapse, a civilizational breakdown, and mass famine within six months, and then you would probably lose a half a billion Chinese over the course of the next year to famine.
Again, I think this is overstated, as there would be enough countries willing to break sanctions, and enough radical actions China could take (conquer Mongolia and parts of Siberia for farming, throw off all Pacific fishing limits, etc.) to avoid the worst case famine scenario. Not that they wouldn’t be in a world of hurt…
The one that has scared the Chinese the most are the boycotts. BP and Halliburton didn’t have to leave, they weren’t doing anything that was sanctioned, but the super majors and the oil services firms and countless other firms left on a moral imperative prompted by individual shareholders and consumers. And in China, the idea that the average Joe or Jane can influence policy is so antithetical to their mindset that they had no idea this was even possible, much less it was going to happen. So everything that the Chinese have based their system and their strategic policy on for the last 30 years has been proven in the last two months to be utterly wrong.”
My judgement of Zeihan’s analysis is that he’s more right than wrong, but has a tendency to overstate his case. Still, a worldwide inflationary spiral and energy shortage is the sort of thing that’s likely to destabilize a lot of governments worldwide, and China’s economy is built on more smoke and mirrors than most.
Fifth Circuit Court Starts Dismantling The Administrative State
May 19th, 2022American Civics 101 teaches us that there are three branches of the American government: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. However, that clean, elegant division started to go awry in the early 20th century (some would place the problems even earlier) with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the vast expansion of the administrative state under the New Deal.
One blow to that traditional tripartite division of federal powers was the creation of administrative courts for independent agencies. Yesterday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which includes Texas) ruled such courts were unconstitutional.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s in-house judges violate the U.S. Constitution by denying fraud defendants their right to a jury trial and acting without necessary guidance from Congress, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday.
The court ruled 2-1 in favor of hedge fund manager George Jarkesy Jr and investment advisor Patriot28 LLC, overturning an SEC administrative law judge’s determination that they committed securities fraud.
A spokesperson for the SEC and counsel for the petitioners did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress passed after the 2008 financial crisis, expanded the SEC’s ability to seek penalties in its administrative proceedings.
In the ruling Wednesday, the majority said that because seeking penalties is akin to debt collection, which is a private right, the defendants were entitled to a jury trial.
The SEC had argued that it was acting to protect investors and enforce public rights found in the securities laws.
The majority also found that SEC judges, known as administrative law judges, lack authority under the Constitution because Congress did not provide guidance on when the SEC should bring cases in-house instead of in a court.
U.S. Circuit Court Jennifer Walker Elrod, joined by Circuit Court Judge Andrew Oldham, penned the majority opinion.
This is a long overdue trimming of the unelected administrative state and a restoration of the division of responsibilities between the three branches that forms part of the Constitution’s vital system of checks and balances. However, given the potentially far-reaching effects of the decision, expect first an en banc hearing of the Fifth Circuit, and then an appeal to the Supreme Court.
Green Delusions Bring Chaos And Death
May 17th, 2022It’s one thing when affluent Granola Americans try to green their own lives via expensive organic food, solar panels and electric cars, but quite another when they write their delusional green policy choices into law. Just as reliance on trendy renewable energy helped trigger Texas ice storm blackouts, so too have other government regulations led to serious, pressing problems.
Take Sri Lanka as the first example:
In less than a year since Sri Lanka became the first country in the world to fully ban conventional agriculture, an economic crisis of epic proportions has gripped the island nation, launched waves of protests, and on Monday prompted the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. Sri Lanka’s pivot to organic farming — with a ban on synthetic fertilizers — triggered a drastic decline in the production of critical crops like tea and rice, something that many agricultural experts had foreshadowed for months.
“Predicted” is the word you want to use there. Or “foretold” if you want to be a little grandiloquent and Biblical for dramatic effect.
And lo, just as the prophecy foretold, it came to pass:
Most accounts show that production dropped between 20 percent to 50 percent of what it was prior to the switch, leaving many of the country’s 22 million people in dire straits. These happenings paint the picture of the clear connection between synthetic crop protection products and food security. And not only had Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides, and fungicides resulted in massive food shortages, it also led to the doubling in price of rice, vegetables, and other market staples.
Just as with Lysenkoism or Mao’s war on birds, reliance on delusional theory rather than actual science led to famine and death.
By the time Sri Lanka opted to reverse most of its mandate over the winter, the situation had gone too far.
The turmoil spurred shortages of electricity and other goods and services in Sri Lanka. Many people have died — and scores injured — in economic- and hunger-related protests, and Rajapaksa required a military rescue this week as chaos closed in around him.
Last summer, prior to the changeover to full organic, 30 national experts wrote to Rajapaksa’s brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa…
“Would you like a side order of Nepotism with your Green Delusion Special?”
…outlining their concern over this seismic policy shift. While they recognize the goals of the president’s program, they proposed a phased, consultative approach — with actual experts — rather than cold turkey, emotive mandates.
“Prior to this policy, the government had unsuccessfully tried to commercialize farm land, which is the biggest commercial asset the country has. So many of us think this was another way to try and get farmers to leave their land, or to weaken the farmers’ position and enable a land grab,” Vimukthi de Silva, an organic farmer in Rajanganaya, told The Guardian.
So just like here, the sheep’s clothing of pious environmentalism hides the ravenous rent-seeking wolf of public subsidy cash grabs.
Closer to home, anti-fossil fuel regulations to fight “Global Warming” have left America dangerously short of refining capacity.
We are now reaching the point where the cost of diesel fuel is making some goods too expensive to transport. One trucker told the Orlando Fox affiliate yesterday that, “The cost of diesel is single-handedly taking us out of the game one by one no matter how big you are. . . . If you’re getting paid $2 per mile you’re not taking that load no matter if it is baby formula or orange juice because the cost of diesel is $5 plus. You just can’t take that load.”
Tractor-trailer trucks loaded up with goods are heavy, meaning that they average “only 6.5 miles per gallon. Their efficiency ranges wildly between 3 miles per gallon going up hills to more than 23 miles per gallon going downhill.” Because of their low fuel economy, trucks have massive gas tanks — tanks with a capacity between 120 and 150 gallons — and some trucks may have two tanks for longer hauls. In other words, on one full tank of diesel, a truck can travel 780 to 975 miles. But as of this morning, filling up the tank for that trip will cost $668 to $836 — a cost of 85 cents per mile.
Keep in mind, “A majority of trucking companies pay [drivers] between $0.28 and $0.40 cents per mile according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. A few companies do pay up to $0.45 cents per mile.”
The default setting of President Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and a lot of other Democrats is that if something is expensive, it is because some company is being greedy, and that the way to “bring down inflation” to “make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.”
But the cost of a gallon of unleaded gasoline or diesel fuel is not just a matter of how greedy an oil company feels on any given day and has very little to do with how much that company is paying in taxes. The cost of crude oil makes up 59 percent of the cost of gallon of regular gasoline, and just 49 percent of the cost of diesel. Refining is a slightly bigger share of the cost of a gallon of diesel fuel than of the cost of a gallon of regular gas — 23 percent for diesel to 18 percent for regular, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Distribution and marketing costs make up 18 percent of diesel costs.
And keep in mind, federal taxes on diesel are slightly higher than those on regular gasoline — 24 cents per gallon on diesel compared to 18 cents per gallon on regular.
Explanation of sales tax cost of diesel snipped.
But if we really want to know why the cost of diesel is increasing faster than the cost of regular gasoline, we need to look at those refining costs. It doesn’t matter how much we “drill, baby, drill,” unless we also have the ability to “refine, baby, refine,” — or we become dependent upon foreign refiners.
Back in 2020, U.S. oil-refinery capacity peaked at 19 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. But because of the pandemic, and the delayed decision to permanently shut down the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery after a major accident in 2019, U.S. refinery capacity declined significantly during that year. (PES was the largest oil refinery on the East Coast and refined 335,000 barrels per day.)
In addition to the PES refinery, five more shut down over the course of 2020: the Shell refinery in Convent, La., the Tesoro Marathon refinery in Martinez, Calif., the HollyFrontier refinery in Cheyenne, Wyo., the Western Refining refinery in Gallup, N.M., and the Dakota Prairie refinery in Dickinson, N.D. Those six collectively refined more than 1 million barrels of oil per day.
Thus, the U.S. started 2021 with its lowest annual refining capacity in six years, and that capacity did not expand significantly over the rest of the year. And as the pandemic’s effects on American life faded, month by month, demand for fuel increased — not just from drivers but from trucking and shipping companies, construction companies — remember, 98 percent of all energy use in the construction sector comes from diesel — and from airlines and other consumers of jet fuel.
Why are we experiencing these stunning fuel prices? Because we’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And you know what happens when you mix lower supply with higher demand.
Right now, someone is likely shouting, “Reopen those closed refineries, then!” But that’s not so easy.
The former PES refinery complex in Philadelphia is being demolished. The Shell refinery is slated to become an “alternative fuels complex,” and it’s a similar transition for the Tesoro refinery. The HollyFrontier refinery is already converted to processing biofuels, as is the Dakota Prairie refinery. (Certain environmentalists will denounce the greedy oil companies and praise the companies producing environmentally friendly biofuels, never stopping to check and realize that many of them are the same companies.)
Wait, I haven’t even gotten to the bad news: Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.
We almost never build oil refineries in the U.S. anymore. According to the EIA, the newest refinery in the United States is the Targa Resources Corporation’s site in Channelview, Texas, which began operating in 2019 and processes 35,000 barrels per day. Before that, the newest refinery with significant downstream unit capacity was Marathon’s facility in Garyville, La. That facility came online in 1977.
Back during the late Bush and early Obama years, Hyperion Energy attempted to start a massive project in South Dakota, aiming to build what would have been the sixth-largest oil refinery in the nation. But the project grew mired in red tape and environmentalist opposition and eventually was canceled. We would have experienced widespread shortages of refined fuels many years ago if some companies had not completed large-scale expansions of existing refineries.
And so, President Biden’s fuming about oil companies not drilling and demanding they “use it or lose it” is something of a red herring; it would not do U.S. oil consumers a lot of good to dramatically expand the supply of crude oil if there isn’t enough refinery capacity to turn that oil into useful products. And right now, there are no major projects planned to build new oil refineries or expand capacity at the existing ones.
Gripped by their green delusions, Democrats have long pledged to make fossil fuel too expensive to use. What they didn’t tell you, however, is that the side effect would be to make it too expensive for truckers to actually transport your food to you.
Ukraine Launches Successful Counteroffensive
May 15th, 2022Ukraine appears to have won a decisive victory by driving Russian forces from the second largest city of Kharkiv and is now pushing them all the way back to the Russian border.
The Russian military has likely decided to withdraw fully from its positions around Kharkiv City in the face of Ukrainian counteroffensives and the limited availability of reinforcements. Russian units have generally not attempted to hold ground against counterattacking Ukrainian forces over the past several days, with a few exceptions. Reports from Western officials and a video from an officer of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) indicate that Moscow is focused on conducting an orderly withdrawal and prioritizing getting Russians back home before allowing proxy forces to enter Russia rather than trying to hold its positions near the city.
Ukraine thus appears to have won the Battle of Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces prevented Russian troops from encircling, let alone seizing Kharkiv, and then expelled them from around the city, as they did to Russian forces attempting to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian forces will likely attempt to disrupt at least the westernmost of the ground lines of communication (GLOCs) between Belgorod and Russian forces concentrated around Izyum, although Russia is using several GLOCs, including some further away from current Ukrainian positions than any Ukrainian counteroffensive is likely to reach soon. The terrain east of current Ukrainian positions may also favor the Russians attempting to defend their GLOCs, as large water features canalize movement and create chokepoints that the Ukrainians would have to breakthrough.
Russian troops continued efforts to advance all along the periphery of the Izyum-Donetsk city salient but made little progress. Russian forces attempted a ground offensive from Izyum that made no progress. We had previously hypothesized that Russia might give up on attempts to advance from Izyum, but the Russians have either not made such a decision or have not fully committed to it yet. Small-scale and unsuccessful attacks on the southern end of the salient near Donetsk City continued but made no real progress.
The main Russian effort continues to be the attempt to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk from the north and from the south. Russian troops attacking from Popasna to the north made no significant progress in the last 24 hours. Russian forces coming north-to-south have failed to cross the Siverskyi Donets River and taken devastating losses in their attempts. The Russians may not have enough additional fresh combat power to offset those losses and continue the offensive on a large enough scale to complete the encirclement, although they will likely continue to try to do so.
Yeah, about that river crossing. There’s an awful lot of post-battle evidence that was an absolute disaster.
Attempting to cross a river near Bilohorivka, east of Lyman, a Russian mechanized battalion got blasted out of existence by Ukrainian artillery:
The better part of a Russian army battalion — 50 or so vehicles and up to a thousand troops — in recent days tried to cross a pontoon bridge spanning the Siverskyi Donets River, running west to east between the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian artillery caught them at the river bank — and destroyed them. The rapid destruction of around three dozen tanks and other armored vehicles, along with the bridge itself, underscores Russia’s deepening woes as its troops try, and fail, to make meaningful gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
“We still assess Russian ground force in the Donbas to be slow and uneven,” an unnamed U.S. Defense Department official told reporters on Tuesday. The Russians’ inability to cross rivers might explain their sloth.
The Siverskyi Donets, which threads from southern Russia into eastern Ukraine then back into Russia, is just one of several water barriers Russian battalions must cross in order to advance west into Ukrainian-held territory. According to the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff, the battalion that got caught at the pontoon bridge apparently was trying to strike at Lyman, a city of 20,000 that lies 17 miles west of the doomed crossing.
The Ukrainian army’s 17th Tank Brigade spotted the bridge, perhaps using one of the many small drones that function as the army’s eyes over the battlefield. The 17th is one of the army’s four active tank brigades. Its line battalions operate T-64 tanks and BMP fighting vehicles. But it was the brigade’s artillery battalion with its 2S1 122-millimeter howitzers that apparently got first crack at the Russian bridge.
The 17th’s shelling destroyed at least seven T-72 and T-80 tanks, 17 BMPs, seven MT-LB armored tractors, five other vehicles and much of the bridging unit itself, including a tugboat and the pontoon span.
It’s unclear how many Russians died or were wounded, but it’s worth noting that no battalion can lose three-quarters of its vehicles and remain capable of operations. In one strike, the Ukrainians removed from the battlefield one of the roughly 99 Russian battalion tactical groups in Ukraine.
Proving that some people (or institutions) don’t learn from their mistakes, Russia compounded their disasterous stupidity by trying the exact same thing again, with the same results.
Russia has made another failed attempt to cross a Donbas river where an entire battalion was wiped out by Ukrainian artillery – losing more men in the process with survivors forced to swim to safety.
Putin’s troops were trying to rescue men and vehicles that had got stranded on the wrong side of the Donets River, near Biolhorivka, after the first attempt on May 8 ended with their pontoon bridges being sunk by an artillery barrage that destroyed dozens of armoured vehicles and may have killed more than 1,000 troops.
But their rescue mission was found out and subjected to the same fate. Fresh satellite images taken near Biolhorivka show yet another sunken pontoon bridge along with half a dozen destroyed or abandoned vehicles.
Russia has lost more than 70 vehicles and seen two infantry battalions mangled in four days of attempts to bridge the river.
Here’s some decent drone footage of the aftermath:
Conducting a river crossing under enemy fire has always been a difficult undertaking, which is why Clausewitz devoted two chapters to the topic. Even the most basic combined-arms operations are difficult to carry out under the best of circumstances. Difficult operations become impossible ones if you’re stupid.