Posts Tagged ‘Nordstream’

LinkSwarm for October 7, 2022

Friday, October 7th, 2022

I hope all BattleSwarm readers are safe from the Joe Biden Armageddon thus far. Today’s LinkSwarm features Democrats disdaining the rules followed by the little people, the UN is delusional enough to think they can run the world and defy the laws of economics, and petting dogs is good for you.

  • The UN is demanding that central banks forget everything everyone learned about inflation in the 1970s and institute price controls instead of raising interest rates.

    UNCTAD, the UN agency dealing with global trade, demanding *all* central banks stop rate hikes and instead switch to price controls. They argue, “policymakers appear to be hoping that a short sharp monetary shock – along the lines, if not of the same magnitude, as that pursued… under Paul Volker – will be sufficient to anchor inflationary expectations without triggering recession. Sifting through the economic entrails of a bygone era is unlikely, however, to provide the forward guidance needed for a softer landing given the deep structural and behavioural changes that have taken place in many economies, particularly those related to financialization, market concentration and labour’s bargaining power.”

    I am not playing tennis with them either, but note the radicalism. Indeed, their latest report also argues, “supply-chain disruptions and labour shortages require appropriate industrial policies to increase the supply of key items in the medium term; this must be accompanied by sustained global policy coordination and (liquidity) support to help countries fund and manage these changes.” So, industrial policy. And Fed swap-lines. Expect both ahead.

    They also ask why we haven’t regulated shadow-banking, and why we allow speculators in global commodity markets who have nothing to do with underlying trade. On the latter they note, “Market surveillance authorities could be mandated to intervene directly in exchange trading on an occasional basis by buying or selling derivatives contracts with a view to averting price collapses or deflating price bubbles.” I expect nothing but that ahead – and geopolitically driven to boot.

    This boils down to: “Hey, we need to institute economic policies proven to fail, because otherwise lots of rich people will lose money!” Wage and price controls were tried in the 1970s and they failed miserably. The longer governments try to defy the market, the more terrible the snapback when those efforts fail.
    

  • Speaking of the UN, they think they own science.
  • Ukraine troops are using spoofed tracking systems and deception to infiltrate Russian lines. (Hat tip: .357 Magnum.)
  • “NYT ‘Right Wing Conspiracy Theory’ Comes True In Less Than 24 Hours.”

    On Tuesday, the New York Times framed a story circulating on the right over a software company’s connection with the Chinese Communist Party as a “right-wing conspiracy theory.”

    “At an invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix, a group of election deniers unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome,” was the Times’ original lede (via the Daily Caller).

    In it, the Times wrote that “right-wing” election deniers in Arizona had fabricated a conspiracy theory that election software company Konnech had secret ties to the CCP, and was passing them information on around two million US poll workers.

    “In the two years since former President Donald J. Trump lost his re-election bid, conspiracy theorists have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims,” reads the article. “But the attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups. Their claims often find a receptive online audience, which then uses the assertions to raise doubts about the integrity of American elections.”

    The next morning, Konnech executive Eugene Yu was arrested for the alleged theft of poll workers’ personal information.

  • New Orleans’ Democrat mayor wants you to know that laws are for the little people.

    New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is facing the threat of a recall election and it’s not just the city’s rising crime that has petition signers enraged.

    The two people behind the petition are both Democrats demanding the Democrat mayor leave office for her “failure to put New Orleans first and execute the responsibilities of the position,” according to Fox News.

    In 2021, more than 150 officers left the New Orleans Police Department, despite a surge in murders and carjackings. Carjackings so far this year stand at 217, an increase of over 200 percent since 2019, according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission weekly bulletin.

    But it’s the mayor’s exorbitant travel spending that has people up in arms.

    She traveled to sister cities Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this summer, costing the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.

    The city’s travel policy requires employees to pay the difference in cost for work-related airfare upgrades, stating “employees are required to purchase the lowest airfare available … employees who choose an upgrade from coach, economy, or business class flights are solely responsible for the difference in cost,” Fox News reported.

    But Cantrell hasn’t paid the near $30,000 bill from her first-class international flight upgrades over the summer.

    She has claimed the visits are an investment in the city and necessary for her safety.

    “My travel accommodations are a matter of safety, not of luxury,” The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported. “As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone. As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be. Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world Black women walk in.”

    Yes, I’m sure the men and women who walk the streets of New Orleans at night have never know unthinkable fear of having to fly coach to Switzerland.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Federal Law Does Not Exempt LGBT Employees From Bathroom, Dress Code, Policies, Judge Rules…A U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) policy document from June 2021 overreached in its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling forbidding employment discrimination based on sexual preference and gender identity, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas found. Texas sued over the guidance.”
  • Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: “Biden hates Republicans so much, he would rather give oil money to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia than Texas.”
  • Related: “Politico reports that Democrats are ‘seething’ about the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day.”

    Well, fellas, if you don’t want OPEC+ to be in a position where it can influence U.S. gasoline prices a month before the election, you need policies that minimize the U.S. market’s dependence upon the global oil market. This means maximizing U.S. oil production and expanding U.S. refinery capacity.

    It would be a mild exaggeration to declare that the Biden administration hascompletely stopped issuing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters, but only a mild one. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.” It’s not a complete halt, but it’s very close to one. This means that the U.S. is almost entirely dependent upon oil production from private lands.

    The good news is that there’s still a lot of oil beneath private lands. As of July, the U.S. was producing 11.8 million barrels per day, an increase from the 11.1 million barrels per day produced in January 2021, the month President Biden took office. But before the pandemic hit in early 2020, the U.S. was producing 12.8 million barrels per day, and it even hit 13 million barrels per day in November 2019. We have the proven ability to produce about 1.2 million more barrels per day than we are, if we want to do so and our public policies encourage it. But right now, they do not.

    The Biden administration keeps insisting that it’s doing everything it can to bring gas prices down, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which is now at its lowest level in 40 years. But what’s in the SPR is oil, not gasoline, and oil must still be refined. You can’t just pump the stuff out of the ground and put it in your car.

    U.S. refineries are running at full capacity, or just short of full capacity. This is why oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases got sent to Europe and Asia, because they had the room and equipment to turn it into actual usable fuel. The U.S. currently has no more spare ability to turn the oil from the reserve into stuff that will actually make your car move; yelling at the oil companies isn’t going to change what is fundamentally an engineering problem.

    And Democrats absolutely refuse to let anyone build new oil refineries.

  • Possibility: Nortstream2 explosion could have just happened because Russians suck at maintenance.

    Multiple sources have confirmed that Nord 2 was full of natural gas; that it was full for at least months; and that said natural gas had never moved.

    It. Just. Sat. There. For — allegedly — months.

    During normal operations of a pipeline, you run a pig through fairly regularly. A “pig” is a bit of equipment pushed by the gas flow, and as it moves along it shoves water and hydrate slurry down to where it can be removed; and it scrapes compounds off the inside walls (hydrogen sulphide, I’m looking at you) that might be are probably eating your pipe.

    Note the part above where the pigs are pushed by the gas. The gas in Nordstream 2 never moved. That means no pig ever went down the line to shove water out, move hydrate slurry, or stop H2S from corroding the steel of the pipeline.

    As I said in the previous post — and I will continue to say — none of this rules out intentional Acts of War. There are idiots enough in that region that sabotage can’t be discounted.

    How-some-ever … hydrate plugs.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • “A lot of folks are running the White House. Joe Biden just isn’t one of them.” “Biden is surrounded with longtime D.C. power players, such as Ron Klain, Susan Rice, Anita Dunn, John Podesta, Gene Sperling – a veritable “who’s who” of Beltway knife fights and insider skullduggery. Throughout their long careers, they’ve never sought credit or voter approval. Just power.”
  • “NYC Mayor Declares State of Emergency over Influx of Illegal Immigrants. [New York City mayor Eric Adams] said at least 17,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the city by bus from other parts of the country since April.” Oh, a million illegal aliens come over the border into Texas and it’s no big deal, but 17,000 show up in your “sanctuary city” and suddenly it’s a problem!
  • “Vermont High School Girls Volleyball Team Banned From Locker Room For Objecting To Changing With Biological Male.”
  • “NYU Fires Chemistry Professor After Students Launch Petition Claiming His Course is Too Hard.” The lesson here seems to be that businesses shouldn’t hire NYU grads…
  • “Meta ordered to pay $175M for copying Green Beret veteran’s app.”
  • Chris Cuomo loses to Paw Patrol. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • British blogger eats on £1 for a single day and has a very tough time of of it, even with foraging and scavenged condiments. Despite the dollar-pound exchange rate being so favorable, I don’t think I could do that on $1 a day shopping at HEB, and even if you made it $1.25, it would have to be three meals of ramen. Also, I don’t think I can even buy a single carrot at HEB (if I had wanted to), spaghetti is considerably more than 23¢ for 500 grams. $5 for $5, that I could do, and $30 for 30 days would be grim but very doable (price, pasta, and beans).
  • Dispatches from Sad Trombonia: “$1.5 Million Floating Home Prototype Sinks Into The Water Just As It’s Unveiled.”
  • Epic basketball player name.
  • Petting a dog can be good for your brain.” Agrees:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • An End To The German Economic Engine?

    Monday, July 11th, 2022

    With Russia shutting down the NordStream gas pipeline for maintenance, Peter Zeihan wonders if the end of Germany’s vaunted economic engine is nigh.

    Some takeaways:

  • NordStream has made Germany “horrendously” dependent on Russia for energy.
  • Russia is blackmailing Germany to stop supporting Ukraine.
  • “Four things that the Germans rely upon to be the economic powerhouse that they are:”
    1. That cheap natural gas.

      Their economic model it is based on access to large volumes of cheap Russian energy, both in terms of for electricity, and as industrial inputs to power the entire German manufacturing model. So that all by itself could kill the German system almost overnight. Well, not overnight, but within a year.

    2. “The Germans rely on a large, robust, highly skilled workforce, but Germany has one of the fastest aging societies in the world…Germany will hit mass retirement this decade, and so the model was always in danger on demographic grounds.”
    3. Third: “Access to central European labor all the way from Poland to Romania and even further east…but that’s going away too. Because just as the Germans are rapidly aging, the central Europeans are aging even more rapidly…the birth rate in all of these countries is actually lower than it is in Germany, so it’s every bit as terminal.”
    4. Fourth, you need the global economic trading system that is now breaking down and America is backing away from.

    His conclusion:

    All of this put together suggests that the manufacturing model that has sustained Germany, that has provided the tax base, that has provided economic growth, that has made the population relatively happy with their situation, it’s gone. And it’s going to vanish within the next year. And a Europe that does not have a German motor at its heart is a Europe that all of a sudden needs to find a very very different way to function.

    As with a lot of Zeihan’s observations, he has a lot of fundamentals right but his conclusions seem overstated. Germany has the resources to abandon their green delusions and restart coal and nuclear plants, assuming they have the political will. And the degree to which globalization is breaking down is the significant subtraction of China and Russia from it. There’s still a lot of U.S./EU trade to be had, even if it does get a bit more expensive. And Germany, so high up on the value-added foodchain, is well-position to survive.

    The labor shortage is a trickier problem to solve, and probably was one of the main reasons Angela Merkel was so intent on raking in Islamic “refugees.” But maybe real refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War might provide an opportunity. It would be pretty ironic if Ukrainians were to find their lebensraum in the bosom of Germany…