It’s Wednesday, April 27th, 2022…but before beginning, courtesy of Balls Cotton and Combat Soldier, we present a pithy primer from Lance Geist on the realities of domestic fossil fuels entitled…
I hold in my hand a 140-milliliter sample of Louisiana light (sweet) crude oil. I collected it myself from a process separator aboard the production facility I work on in the Gulf of Mexico. It may not seem like much to you, but it really is a very remarkable substance! It’s more than 50 million years old, and came from an oil reservoir that’s almost 20,000 feet underground. Very soon, it will travel hundreds, or maybe even thousands of miles on its journey to becoming one of the many products that crude oil is refined into. It has a dark earthy brown color, is slightly less viscous than tap water, tastes worse than it smells, and is the life blood of the world economy. Believe it or don’t, but this sample represents the single most valuable commodity in existence. Without it, nearly every facet of modern civilization stops.Immediately.
This sample contains about .0028% of my facility’s daily crude oil output, but is less than four hundred-millionths of 1% of the United States’ daily crude oil consumption. It’s also an infinitely small amount when compared to the 4+ trillion barrels of known domestic crude oil reserves. That means there’s a frikken’ buttload of crude oil, right here in the good ol’ US of A! It’s enough to sustain us for more than 400 years, which is way longer than we’ll need sustaining for because we’ll probably be extinct by then. Ok, maybe not. But maybe so. Who knows?One thing is certain though; there’s no shortage of domestic crude oil, and more is being discovered everyday. So, we’ll likely still be discovering new oil reserves long after we’re extinct. Maybe not. Who knows.
Anyway, so what’s the point of this? Why have I told you this? It’s to expose you to the truth about crude oil and the oil industry, because you’ve been lied to. Not by me though. You’ve been lied to by the phony President and his phony cronies, but I want to set the record straight. I’m going to tell you the truth, so pay attention.
1. There is enough recoverable crude oil within the continental US to supply current and projected future demand for 400+ years, and that’s just the oil we know about. It doesn’t account for future discoveries. That’s a fact, jack.
2. We do not need to import a SINGLE DROP of foreign crude oil. The domestic oil industry can easily meet, and even surpass domestic demand. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. That’s a fact, jack.
3. The domestic oil industry currently cannot satisfy domestic demand due to oil drilling restrictions imposed by the federal government. That’s a fact, jack.
4. The price of EVERYTHING revolves around oil, and the law of supply vs demand dictates the price of oil. When oil is plentiful, commodities are cheap. When oil is scarce, commodities are more expensive. Right now, domestic oil is scarce, and the price of everything is high because of these restrictions imposed by the federal government. That’s a fact, jack.
5. We import foreign oil from countries that drill and produce it much cheaper than we’re able to because they do not implement all of the environmental safeguards that we do. Their methods are FAR more destructive to the environment than ours are. (Once again…
6. Every year, the federal government leases tracts of land to oil companies so they can explore on it for oil. If enough oil is found during exploration, the company can then apply for a drilling permit which allows them to drill a well. If no oil is found during exploration, or if the amount found is not enough to be profitable the lease expires without ever being drilled on. Leases that are active, but not being drilled on does NOT mean that oil companies are being lazy, or are trying to keep the oil for themselves, etc. etc. It means they’ve either explored the lease for oil and found nothing, or found oil but it’s not enough to justify drilling for. That’s a fact, jack.
7. It’s not Russia’s fault, or China’s fault, or Ukraine, or India, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Bangledesh, or any other countries’ fault as to why everything is so expensive right now. It’s Joe Biden’s fault, because he is suppressing the domestic oil industry for political gain. That’s a fact, jack.
You see…I don’t take it kindly when he and his cohorts go on national TV and bold-face lie to the American public about the oil industry. I don’t appreciate when my hard work and dedication is eroded by corrupt, self-serving politicians who don’t know jack shit about this trade. It doesn’t sit right with me, when they promote an unsustainable alternative energy policy that benefits themselves and their corrupt business partners while leaving people like me and you with barely a pot to piss in. It all kind-of rubs me the wrong way, you know? Especially since pretty much EVERYTHING depends on crude oil…but you might not know that if you believe the lies that are being told about oil and the oil industry.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’re now more knowledgeable about the oil industry than most of our politicians are. So what should you do with all of this new knowledge? It just so happens that I’ve got a great suggestion for you! The next time they’re on TV lying to you about the oil industry to try and cover their asses, remember what you’ve learned here…and remember it again when it comes time to vote.
Here’s a related shot of the juice:
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in the wake of the world’s richest man acquiring a social media platform no one else seemed to want (and who was accused of being both a racist and a clear and present threat to freedom for his effort by the combined forces of The Left), Jim Freeman details how both the world’s second-richest man (who, curiously enough, wasn’t similarly defamed when he purchased The Washington Post)…
“Years ago in a different America, media folk would express concern that a rich guy buying a media outlet might enforce an ideological viewpoint. Now with Elon Musk and Twitter, the media pack is terrified that he won’t. The great fear among the press corps is that the social-media platform might allow all consumer thoughts to be expressed.
Perhaps we can thank the failures of university educators for the amazing transformation of U.S. journalists from stouthearted defenders of free speech to its most formidable domestic opponents. The new conventional media view is that the most important challenge facing Twitter is figuring out which theories to suppress and which nonviolent speakers to silence. The idea that one might allow an open forum is now treated by many prominent pundits almost as a reason to call the vice squad. CNN’s Brian Stelter warns:
If you get invited to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually want to go to that party or are you going to decide to stay home?
Some of us have been looking for that party all our lives. Certainly most of us are willing to consider party invitations that don’t arrive with a set of rules. At least Mr. Stelter seems to understand that engaging in Twitter conversation is a voluntary activity.
The press watchdogs at NewsBusters have been chronicling the media meltdown over the possibilityof Twitter liberty. One can only hope that the anchors and panelists at CNN and MSNBC will be able to remain in their safe spaces on set to avoid exposure to dangerous new ideas. Or perhaps they’d really be better off spending some time outside the comforting walls of their progressive playpens. Mr. Musk for his part tweeted this week:
I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
So far it seems that Twitter is still letting Musk critics swing away—and raise unflattering questions about the Tesla founder who will now own Twitter. Mike Forsythe of the New York Times tweets:
Apropos of something:
–Tesla’s second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US)
-Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla’s EVs.
-After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform
My own answer (after casting baseless inuendo Musk’s way) to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.
But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity.
This would be a legitimate question if raised by people in almost any organization other than the New York Times or the Washington Post. The premise of Mr. Musk’s purchase is to rescue Twitter from the managers and staff who allowed the social media company to become not an open communications platform but an ideological enforcer. And there is no better example of Twitter’s assault on free inquiry and open dialogue than its suppression of the New York Post’s 2020 reporting on Biden family business overseas, especially in China. The New York Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar approach, generally ignoring the disturbing evidence uncovered by the New York Post about the Bidens and China except when they were actively disparaging it.
After their journalistic malpractice during the period when the story might have been relevant to voters in 2020—and perhaps wary of revelations still to come—both papers have recently acknowledged at long last that the story was legitimate. In March of this year, only 16 months after the presidential election, the New York Times said that Hunter Biden emails have been “authenticated.” Meanwhile at the Washington Post, Matt Viser, Tom Hamburger and Craig Timberg recently published a long report that begins:
The deal was years in the making, the culmination of forging contacts, hosting dinners, of flights to and from China. But on Aug. 2, 2017, signatures were quickly affixed, one from Hunter Biden, the other from a Chinese executive named Gongwen Dong.
Within days, a new Cathay Bank account was created. Within a week, millions of dollars started to change hands.
Within a year, it would all begin to collapse.
While many aspects of Hunter Biden’s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.
You don’t say? And it turns out there’s another interesting question related to Mr. Bezos, Amazon and China. Bradford Betz at Fox Business writes:
Bezos’ commentary on Tesla’s relationship with China is peculiar given a Reuters investigation in December that found Amazon had capitulated to demands from China to continue doing business and grow the company there.
In addition, some 38% of Amazon’s top-selling brands are based in China, a report from the firm Daxue Consulting found late last year.
As for the December Reuters report, Steve Stecklow and Jeffrey Dastin wrote:
Amazon.com Inc was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China.
A negative review of Xi’s book prompted the demand, one of the people said. “I think the issue was anything under five stars,” the highest rating in Amazon’s five-point system, said the other person.
Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon’s e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.
Amazon’s compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world’s largest marketplaces.
An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company’s China business lays out a number of “Core Issues” the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: “Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success,” the document notes. “We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong.”
There are so many interesting questions about Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk and the New York Times and the Washington Post. Let’s hope they can all be asked, answered, discussed and debated on Twitter.“
As the great Daniel Francis so famously said, if you want to know what crimes Progressives are committing, just look at the activities of which they’re accusing others:
Listening to these feckless fools, it’s almost as if they’ve never even heard about the news blackout of Hunter’s laptop. As Townhall.com’s Matt Vespa responded:
“It’s almost laughable. It comes off as a parody. We know, dude. We know about the power and the bias within these platforms.”
Here’s hoping Elon Musk’s practices match his promises.
“It’s pretty obvious what President Biden could do to boost his approval ratings and improve his party’s rapidly dissolving prospects in the midterms. He could reverse course on some, or many, or all of the bad policy choices that people hate. He could, for instance, go down to the border and outline a harsh new set of policies for cracking down on illegal immigration. He could give a speech blasting away at woke DAs such as Chesa Boudin (San Francisco), George Gascón (Los Angeles), Alvin Bragg (Manhattan), and Larry Krasner (Philadelphia) for being soft on crime and making minority communities much less safe. He could go up to Montana to say he’s restarting the Keystone Pipeline and announce that he’s opening the spigot on American oil and gas development. He could waive the Jones Act to goose the supply chain. To relieve inflationary pressures, he could tell people who have student debt, “The party’s over, pal. Pay up.” He could talk up an austerity budget and/or try to jawbone the Fed into sharply raising interest rates. If he switched sides on even one issue in the culture war, even by giving a speech, it would impress moderates. How about going to Virginia to back parental rights in education and lambast teachers who foist woke sexual politics on third-graders?
I am happy to offer Jumbled Joe this advice because I’m sure he’ll reject it in toto. Three cheers for that, because it means his party is going to meet the midterms like a log heading into a wood chipper. Reasonable Democrats are begging the party to pay heed to what the voters actually want and getting absolutely no traction. “There is as much a plan to win the midterms as there was to airlift Afghans out of Kabul,” one Democratic strategist told the Washington Post. Instead of slapping down the woketivist far Left, Joe Biden is channeling Principal Skinner and asking himself: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.” To Democrats, voters are children: The wayward ones need to be taught and corrected instead of heeded.
Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party’s media arm (colloquially known as “the media”) are all ignoring the Democratic Party’s policy problem and whining that something called “disinformation” is making their wise policies unpopular. The voters are preparing to punish Democrats because they have supposedly taken to believing stuff that isn’t actually true, so the Democrats feel they must lash out at the unfairness of the information ecosystem rather than looking in the mirror.
So, they’ll start with a concentrated effort to get the New York Times and the Washington Post to apologize for spending three years pursuing a shaggy-dog story about a fictitious illegal conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and then sanction Hillary Clinton for suggesting the 2016 election was illegitimate?
Probably not. “Disinformation” is the new “fake news,” a magical incantation that Democrats use to ward off alarming data. Democrats are working their way up to the belief that any time they lose an election, they should attack Facebook. Hey, guys, why not go after Verizon and Gmail while you’re at it? There are all sorts of ways people spread info around. You’re thinking too small.
Two non-crazy Democrats I find to be essential reads are Ruy Teixeira and Matt Yglesias. Teixeira coined the useful term “the Fox News Fallacy” to describe how Democrats are talking themselves into believing they should dismiss any point raised by Sean Hannity and Co. Is someone on Fox sputtering about illegal immigration? Well, that’s how we know it’s not a real issue! It’s only the highest-rated cable-news channel. Why pay attention?
Yglesias made a cutting point just by quoting a leading Democrat in his newsletter, Slow Boring. It’s an excerpt from Obama foreign-policy kingpin Ben Rhodes’s memoir. Rhodes ventured as far as two states away from home to a B&B in West Virginia while he was working on his book. He discovered that the owner was friendly and chatty and . . . quite angry about rising crime and unchecked illegal immigration. But she was also interested in conspiracy theories about Benghazi, so Rhodes ignored the blinking-neon sign over this little encounter —perfectly normal and reasonable working-class white people hate mass illegal immigration, and each of them lives in a state that gets two Senate seats — and instead convinced himself that the actual takeaway was: “Don’t try to reach these crazy working-class whites, all they care about is Benghazi.”
Yglesias says the Democrats’ obsession with disinformation is a pointless hobby:
I wish Obama had instead said that there’s no evidence that conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent, that deactivating Facebook makes people less knowledgable about politics, that poorly informed people have always been with us, and that one part of politics is delivering quality governing results while the other part is meeting people where they are, not pining for some alternate reality where they have totally different beliefs.
Here’s hoping the White House does not hire Yglesias, Teixiera, or any of the other common-sense Democrats (such as Josh Barro, Nate Silver, and David Shor) who think polls contain useful information about what leaders should do. Instead, White House chief of staff Ron Klain is saying: Steady as she goes, Emmanuel Macron was just reelected in France despite a 36 percent approval rating! For the second time in a row, we’ve got a president who thinks: So many people hate me, I must be doing something right.“
It’s as Joe Concha recently observed:
Fact is, as former SecDef Robert Gates stated in his memoir, Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” We’d go Bob one better and aver, when it comes to Biden, far from being merely…
And in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, in one of his rants forwarded by Balls Cotton, Rich reveals…
Proof of Mass Insanity*
John Deere
* At least in corporate America!
Check this out, folks— the lefties are now going after diesel powered farm equipment and want electric tractors and combines.
A close friend farms over 10,000 acres of corn in the Midwest. The property is spread out over 3 counties.
His operation is a “partnership farm” with John Deere. They use the larger farm operations as demonstration projects for promotion and development of new equipment. He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023.
He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded in every 3 years. Also, over 10 really BIG tractors. JD wants him to go all electric soon.
He said: “Ok, I have some questions.How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?” “How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in?” “How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”
There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.
When the corn is ready to harvest, it has to have the proper sugar and moisture content. If it is too wet, it has to be put in giant dryers that burn natural or propane gas, and lots of it. Harvest time is critical because if it degrades in sugar content or quality, it can drop the value of his crop by half a million dollars or more. It is analyzed at time of sale.
It is standard procedure to run these machines 10 to 12 days straight, 24 hours a day at peak harvest time. When they need fuel, a tanker truck delivers it, and the machines keep going.
John Deere’s only answer is “we’re working on it.” They are being pushed by the lefty Dems in the government to force these electric machines on the American farmer.
These people are out of control. They are messing with the production of food crops that feed people and livestock…all in the name of their “green dream.” Look for the cost of your box of cornflakes to triple in the next 24 months…
That on top of how much it’s already skyrocketed. Talking to Major Jon on Tuesday afternoon, he informed us he’d driven past a gas station that morning and diesel was $5.00/gal. When he passed the same station two hours later the price had climbed to $5.19.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…and Mark Foster:
We take that last one firmly to heart!
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, a very sordid story indeed, as we learn an…
“The president of a local school board in Ohio resigned after he was caught attempting to meet with whom he thought was an 11-year-old girl after allegedly exchanging inappropriate messages with her. John Gray, who was serving his fifth term as president of the Goshen Local School board in Goshen, Ohio, admitted to traveling about two hours from Cincinnati to Indiana to meet with the girl, according to the video uploaded to YouTube and Facebook on Saturday by the groups PCI: Predator Catchers Indianapolis and PCM: Predator Catchers Muncie. The groups are comprised of volunteers who work to expose sexual predators, according to their websites.
The video, which is titled “60 Year old President of Goshen OH school board, meeting an 11 y/o,” depicts Gray trying to explain himself for more than 30 minutes as three volunteers grill him regarding text messages in which he allegedly talked to the girl about undressing, kissing and receiving a massage. Gray remained adamant that he had no intentions of having sexual intercourse with the girl, which he said was impossible because of his impotence…”
Our initial reaction to a 60-year-old man attempting to use impotence to somehow legitimize a dalliance with an 11-year-old girl, whatever his intentions, was this classic snippet from The Wizard of Oz:
But then we got to thinking: Given the predictable progression of Progressive-promoted perversion, on what basis should Mr. Gray be removed from office, let alone charged with a crime? Surely not Biblically-based Judeo-Christian morals and ethics, or a system of laws largely based thereon. After all, aren’t morals, ethics and laws…like genders…fully fluid, thus subject to the day-to-day whims of the individual, be they humble citizens or all-knowing jurists?
Particularly when compared to the span of recorded history, once William O. Douglas sensed a mythical “right to privacy” emanating from a Constitutional penumbra, ponder the pace at which America moved from the legalized slaughter of the unborn to a constitutional right of homosexual marriage. Then how quickly thereafter free speech became hate speech, a campaign mounted to force the embrace of more genders than Heinz has varieties and mentally-ill, male under-achievers allowed to destroy the hopes and dreams of female athletes.
So how long can it be until the John Grays of the world are allowed, indeed encouraged, to arrange tête-à-têtes with whomever they please, irrespective of the age of their prey or their personal ability to perform? Just sayin’.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Tucker highlights not only how The Left is opposed to Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but how a man’s enemies shall be of his own house.
Tales of The Darkside
As this forward from Jeff Foutch details, “clean”, renewable energy is anything BUT clean, nor, in many cases, renewable.
On the Lighter Side
When life attempts to imitate art, in this case, The Dukes of Hazzard. Bo Duke this guy ain’t!
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