Interesting Items 07/04

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue –

1.  Refineries
2.  EPA
3.  Dobbs
4.  Voting
5.  Sleepers
6.  Recruitment
7.  Musk

1.  Refineries.  This one is more of a correction than anything else, coming from a long-time correspondent in the petroleum industry.  Last week, I used a comment attributed to the Chevron CEO that the rules are such today that he didn’t think there would be another refinery built in the US.  Short description is that the greens have a judicial veto in the courts and regulator veto when democrats infest the White House.  Turns out that was wrong.  Not only are new refineries being built, but they are being built all the time.  The flow of ultra-low sulfur, light, tight shale crude doesn’t play well with the heavier crude at most of the older refineries.  It is generally mixed with heavier stuff, so it doesn’t lock the cracking process.  As an aside, this is similar to cracking problems by Coal to Liquids (CTL) plants, which have a reactor specifically designed to process coal from a specific bed fed into it.  Input coal changes, and you have to change the reactor, which is a major modification to the plant.  There are currently 6 refineries planned for West Texas (Permian Basin), to process its light oil (mostly exported today due to inability to refine it).  Another is expecting final funding and has all the permits in place.  A new refinery was built in Galveston 2019 – 2020 to process ship bunkering fuel that would comply with international low sulfur standards.  Its product will be shipped to an existing refinery for finishing.  My correspondent goes on to state that there are no suitable refineries remaining globally for retirement.  The ones presently shut down are being converted to renewable diesel from animal and vegetable sources (animal fat, vegetable oil).  The majority of this production is in ND and LA. 

2.  EPA.  And the hits just kept coming last week out of the Supreme Court with its West Virginia v EPA opinion.  This opinion finds the 2015 O’Bama Clean Power Plan unconstitutional, as congress did not confer this sort of authority on the EPA via the Clean Air Act.  The Clean Power Plan was the O’Bama vehicle to replace coal power plants (and in turn, natural gas power plants) with green energy sources (wind and solar).  The plan claimed to lower CO2 emissions by 32% via a number of regulatory mandates.  As with most action out of the EPA, their foundation was rhetorical sleight of hand, all couched in expected scaremongering (echoed by the minority Justices in their dissent) that the problem was simply too important to wait for congress to take action.  The 6-3 majority disagreed, telling the EPA they didn’t have the authority.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion.  Kagan wrote the dissent.  Expect this opinion to be at the center of legal warfare aimed at shutting down the Harris – Xiden war on fossil fuel in the days, weeks, months and years to come.  This might be the most important opinion of the 2021 – 2022 SCOTUS.  Note that it took the O’Bama greens 7 years to come up with the tortured legal logic underlying the Clean Power Plan.  That logic underlies the majority of EPA anti-carbon rules since then.  The SCOTUS just gutted that logic, which means most, if not all, of their green rules are in the cross hairs, all of which makes me sleep a tiny bit better tonight. 

3.  Dobbs.  There was a lot of additional fallout from Dobbs.  Here are some examples. 

• The pro-aborts are trotting out their hysterical arguments of death, doom and destruction all aimed at women (apparently, you don’t need to be a biologist any more to know what a woman is after all).  Fake news is carrying their water for all it is worth.  One fake news scaremongering talking point accuses the pro-life states of wanting to prohibit their citizens from traveling out of state for an abortion.  Goolag has gone so far as to modify their search algorithms.  Nobody to the best of my knowledge has done, or even threatened this.  The closest anyone came are comments by Ron DeSantis (R, FL) aimed at prohibiting abortions via telehealth.  I get where he is coming from, but if telehealth works for other things, it will eventually work for abortions.  This is not a abortion good/bad comment.  Rather it is a comment on the improvement in remote health care which is coming at us like a freight train.
• The second fake news scaremongering are future bans on contraception.  Nobody on the right is talking about banning any of this.  OTOH, there are Republicans pointing out that the RU-486 abortion pill does have some serious side effects that ought to be considered or at least known by the users beforehand, as it basically causes a miscarriage.  There is blood and the baby is passed from the body, small points ignored by the pro-aborts.  Lisa Murkowski (R, Pro-Abort) is in some serious trouble here in Alaska for her reelection.  Her campaign has decided to accuse her challenger Kelly Tshibaka of wanting to ban contraceptives, something Tshibaka has never proposed, as her hill to die upon.  Alaska is pretty evenly split on abortion.  I don’t think this is going to get Lisa any support she doesn’t already have.  Looks like NY Governor Hochul is going to do the same thing in her election bid. 
• Other scaremongering dressed up as reportage suggests that the conservative majority will go after gay marriage, gay rights, and all the other social hot buttons adopted by the left these days.  They have successfully terrified blacks into voting for them for 60 years.  I expect they believe this will be successful.
• Perhaps funniest, is general agreement on BOTH sides of the abortion argument that 9 unelected men in robes shouldn’t be deciding what women do with their bodies.  This first showed as a meme captured below.  The response is that the Justices, said “You’re right, we should never have decided that” and returned the entire mess to the states.  The pro-aborts are trying to make the case that men shouldn’t decide, but they forget that the men DID decide when they wrote the Roe opinion.  This court, including women, found that Roe was wrongly decided and returned it to the states.

• No good deed goes unpunished.  In the case of Dobbs, there are tens of thousands of pro-abort judges on state benches, all of whom want to reprise Roe at the state level, bypassing the legislative process, installing their preferences by judicial fiat.  Indeed, the first of thousands of temporary restraining orders issued by pro-abort judges in multiple states came down last week.  Interestingly enough, little to no opposite lawfare is going on in the blue, pro-abort states.  I don’t think their arrogant, illegal and immoral actions are going to stand.  From the Dobbs opinion, pp 8, we have the following:

(e) Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. The Court overrules those decisions and returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives. Pp. 78–79.

I have bolded the important portion (at least to me) of the opinion above:  “… returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”  State judiciaries are NOT elected representatives, even the elected judges, who are not part of the legislative process.  While great reading, the Alito concurrence is not what the SCOTUS decided.  What is written and voted upon in pp 8 is.  If they wanted state judges to decide this, they would have said so.  They didn’t.  And any single legislature, governor, attorney general who allows a state judge or state supreme court to grab this authority ought to tar and feathered for simple malfeasance. 

4.  Voting.  One of the things that come with new information is the ability to see old facts through new eyes.  Scott Adams brought this up in one of his daily podcasts last week.  In the 2012 election, there were locations, all in urban areas (black precincts) that had zero votes for Mitt Romney in 2012, even though they had votes for McCain 4 years earlier.  Philly had 59 precincts.  Chicago had 37.  I expect there were more.  At the time, we all looked at this and waved it off, figuring that the blacks voted for O/Bama for tribal or racial reasons.  But after 2020, when the vast majority of shenanigans took place in black urban areas, we can no longer look at what happened in 2012 the same way again.  Looks like one of the O’Bama projects was to thoroughly corrupt the voting process, especially in black urban areas, to benefit democrats.  I wonder how long blacks in those places will allow themselves to be played like chumps, used as simple cogs in the great racial democrat election machine.  I also wonder how long the rest of us will allow it.  An interesting, related observation is that during the COVID festivities and the Biden administration, we learned that every single government entity is corrupt, doesn’t work, lies and produces fraudulent results.  The list is nearly endless:  FBI, DoJ, CDC, EPA, FDA, DoD (Afghanistan), just to name a few.  Yet we are told that 51+ election systems all operate perfectly, and the results are clean as the freshly fallen snow.  Anyone believe that anymore?

5.  Sleepers.  While this one may be far too good to be true, I’ll pass it along anyway.  A SC democrat state representative running for US Senate held a telephone conference with her campaign and supporters a few weeks ago.  The call was leaked and posted by Project Veritas.  In it, the candidate, one Krystle Matthews advocated for recruiting sleeper candidates to run as Republicans in the Republican primary for state and local elections.  She believes the sleepers could wreak havoc from the inside, damaging the Republican brand, eventually flipping politics in SC from Republican to democrat.  She also talked about using drug money for her campaign, probably a federal felony, not like DoJ or the FBI pays attention to any of that from that side of the political divide anymore.  Nice to see democrats saying what we all thought they were saying internally all along.  Like I said at the beginning, this is almost too good to be true, or she is truly that dumb.  Note that I did not question her veniality, as that comes along with being a democrat.

6.  Recruitment.  What happens when you conduct an internal purge, jettison all possible Republicans and Trump supporters, force the vax on everyone in uniform, embrace CRT and the trans madness for all its worth?  What else?  Your recruitment numbers crater.  Way down.  So, it is with the peacetime Harris – Xiden military, which all the sudden is facing a historic military recruitment shortfall.  The Breitbart piece does not have recruitment numbers for the rest of the services, but the Army only met 40% of its recruitment goals for Fiscal 2022.  As usual, Biden’s useful idiots in Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley’s DoD are blaming it on a tight job market and lack of access to high schools during the COVID shutdowns.  Internal DoD survey believes it has a messaging problem, which is actually true.  The message is that DoD is no longer interested in half the population of this nation, including conservatives, religious Americans, or Republicans.  Good luck keeping the doors open with the current uniformed leadership, political appointees and the cuckolded General Officer corps.

7.  Musk.  After a busy month negotiating his Twitter purchase in public, Elon Musk was quiet on Twitter for a couple weeks until a tweet of a meeting with Pope Francis over the weekend.  There are three things that may shut down the acquisition.  First is the unresolved number of fake / bot accounts on Twitter.  Second is the ongoing stock market crash.  Much of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla, whose stock is down 49% since Nov 2021.  Finally, Musk must get approval from Twitter shareholders.  While all of these are known quantities, it is most interesting that Musk was quiet on Twitter for a few weeks after driving the conversation for months previously.  Why?

More later –

– AG