Our total operating refinery capacity dropped by 4.5 percent between 2020 and 2021 to 17.7 million barrels per day. That’s the lowest level we’ve seen since 2013. The current U.S. stockpile of diesel fuel is at a nearly two-decade low. The distilled fuel oil stockpile also declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the price of jet fuel has been rising due to supply and demand issues. Because the vast majority of food and other goods are all transported by a combination of aircraft and trucks (the vast majority of which use diesel), when those prices rise, the cost of everything goes up. And when the supply of those fuels falters, the supply chain shuts down. We already saw examples of this over the past six months. If something doesn’t change, it’s going to get worse.
All of this is taking place during the same period of time when President Biden has canceled three oil and gas lease sales.
CORAL CURES: Watch dolphins line up to self-medicate skin ailments at coral “clinics.” “When lead author Gertrud Morlock, an analytical chemist and food scientist at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, and her team used planar separations combined with on-surface assays and high-resolution mass spectrometry to analyze samples of the gorgonian coral Rumphella aggregata, the leather coral Sarcophyton sp., and the sponge Ircinia sp., they found 17 active metabolites with antibacterial, antioxidative, hormonal, and toxic activities. This discovery of these bioactive compounds led the team to believe that the mucus of the corals and sponges is serving to regulate the dolphin skin’s microbiome and treat infections.”
(05:44 PM)
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Law & Order: Microaggression Victims Unit (Video).
STACY MCCAIN: “John Durham has already won. Regardless of how the Michael Sussman trial ends, the Special Counsel has proven through evidence and testimony that the person responsible for the ‘Russian collusion’ smear against Donald Trump was none other than Hillary Clinton.”
China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week – the world’s first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It’ll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles.
The Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard began construction on the Zhu Hai Yun last July in Guangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, it’s the first carrier of its kind, a self-contained autonomous platform that will roll out with everything necessary to perform a fully integrated operation including drone aircraft, boats and submersibles.
t’s kitted out with everything it needs to deploy its own boats, subs and aircraft, communicate with them, and run co-ordinated missions, including conducting “task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional views of specific targets,” according to the shipbuilding company. The aerial drones can land back on its deck, and it stands ready to retrieve the boats and subs once they’ve made their rounds.
“The Intelligent, unmanned ship is a beautiful new ‘marine species’ that will bring revolutionary changes for ocean observation,” said Professor Dake Chen of the Chinese Academy of Science’s School of Oceanography.
While it’s mainly pitched as an ocean research platform, the SCMP also reports that it has “military capability to intercept and expel invasive targets,” a capability at the forefront of many autonomous marine projects.
Please note that Beijing went from laying down a new class of ship to christening is less than a year.
BLUE CITY BLUES: Houston Exceeds Its Credit Limit. “It 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.'”
MICROBIOME NEWS: Living with dogs (but not cats) as a toddler might protect against Crohn’s disease. “The study found that exposure to dogs, particularly from ages 5 to 15, was linked with healthy gut permeability and balance between the microbes in the gut and the body’s immune response, all of which might help protect against Crohn’s disease. Similar effects were observed with exposure to dogs across all age groups.”
Between the manpower shortages that have plagued the post-Soviet military for decades and equipment losses in Ukraine, all I can say is: Good luck with that.
Oh, and [far-left PA Democrat Senate candidate John Fetterman] chased down a black jogger with a loaded shotgun in 2013. The jogger said Fetterman pointed the shotgun at his chest; Fetterman denies this but allows that his intent was to detain the jogger. At the time, Fetterman was mayor of a small town in Pennsylvania. Trip Gabriel of the New York Timesfrets, “The GOP use of this 2013 incident . . . has begun.” Gabriel previously published a detailed account of this episode that puts the gentlest imaginable spin on events but . . . Fetterman chased down an innocent, unarmed black jogger with a shotgun and detained him.
Intelligence officers say more than 50 specialists, all with vast experience in making and delivering the crude explosive, have been in Russia for several weeks working alongside officials from Vladimir Putin’s military.
Their arrival is understood to be one factor behind US and European warnings that the Russian military may have been preparing for the use of chemical weapons in the conflict, which has entered its fourth month with little sign of slowing.
Barrel bombs – crude explosives packed in to a drum and dropped from a helicopter – were used to devastating effect throughout the Syrian war.
Under Vlad Putin, Russia is transforming itself from a Third World nation with a First World military to a Third World nation with a Third World military.
(12:35 PM)
WHY ELIZABETH WARREN’S NEW ‘ANTI-INFLATION’ PLAN WOULD FAIL MISERABLY: “So, under Warren’s legislation, we would see more shortages and rationing. This isn’t just economic theory. It’s reality. Peer-reviewed research has shown that during the pandemic, states with similar ‘anti-price-gouging’ laws saw more shortages of COVID-19-related goods such as hand sanitizer than states without them.”
That’s the President of the United States calling the $5.00 a gallon gasoline that is crushing Americans an “incredible transition.” And lest anyone think I’m misreading him, he means it exactly as it sounds and says as much by citing that we’ll become “less reliant” on fossil fuels in the end.
In other words, this is all intentional. Biden and his handlers saw an opportunity to destroy the energy market and have done everything in their power to make that a reality. The most recent example came after the administration canceled more oil and gas leases that could have helped relieve price pressures long-term.
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We’ve moved past the point of simple political disagreement and into the realm of purposeful sabotage in order to obtain a delusional partisan goal. They aren’t even hiding the ball anymore. These people want you to suffer.
FASTER, PLEASE: New technology makes cancerous tumors eliminate themselves. “Scientists at the University of Zurich have modified a common respiratory virus, called adenovirus, to act like a Trojan horse to deliver genes for cancer therapeutics directly into tumor cells. Unlike chemotherapy or radiotherapy, this approach does no harm to normal healthy cells. Once inside tumor cells, the delivered genes serve as a blueprint for therapeutic antibodies, cytokines and other signaling substances, which are produced by the cancer cells themselves and act to eliminate tumors from the inside out.”
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Top Trans Medical Org Used Castration Fetish Site for Research to Develop Guidance for Doctors. “WPATH, which sets medical standards for transgender medical procedures according to U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, released new draft guidelines Dec. 3, 2021 which include ‘eunuch’ as a gender identity. The organization pulled information from a website called ‘Eunuch Archive,’ which hosts thousands of members who discuss their castration fantasies and, according to WPATH, hosted a popular post providing instructions for self-castration.”
I mean, it was always an obvious scam that was going to hurt black people the most, but now it’s really obvious, and even the press can’t cover that up anymore.
(09:36 AM)
V’GER SMILES: Something strange is up with 45-year-old spacecraft Voyager 1. “Voyager 1’s altitude articulation and control system (AACS) is sending back some strange readings, and engineers are puzzled as the craft is still operating normally. The AACS is responsible for keeping Voyager in the right orientation and making sure that its antenna is pointing toward Earth so that the spacecraft can transmit data. But now, the AACS is sending back data that doesn’t make any sense — the data looks like it could be scrambled, for example, or suggests that the system is in an impossible state — even though the antenna is still pointing the right way and transmitting just fine.”
(09:07 AM)
CLINICAL TRIALS IN CHINA: There has been a surge in China since 2018 of clinical trials of potential new drugs. Given China’s history of falsifying the data in such trials, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are raising questions and seeking a Government Accountability Office (GAO) probe at the FDA. Why FDA? Because besides manufacturing of baby formula, the FDA has a big role in clinical trials.
Ukraine has sown crops on 11.84 million hectares, or 82.2% of the 14.4-million-hectare area planned for this spring, including crops sown on 1,94 million hectares on May 12-19, the Ukrainian Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food said on Friday.
Sunflower crops have been sown on 3.94 million hectares (80% of the 4.93 million hectares planned for 2022), corn on 4.17 million hectares (86% of 4.85 million hectares), spring barley on 927,500 hectares (92.6% of 1.02 million hectares), spring wheat on 188,600 hectares (99.4% of 189,600 hectares), oats on 156,800 hectares (95.8% of 163,600 hectares), and peas on 124,800 hectares (86% of 145,700 hectares) as of May 19, according to a statement published on the ministry website.
In addition, the areas sown with potatoes stand at 1.07 million hectares (90% of 1.19 million hectares), while soybeans are sown on 728,600 hectares (78.6% of 1.25 million hectares), sugar beet on 182,000 hectares (88% of 206,900 hectares), spring rapeseed on 28,400 hectares (95.3% of 29,800 hectares), millet on 32,100 hectares (51.5% of 62,300 hectares) and buckwheat on 37.400 hectares (46% of 81,600 hectares).
“The sowing is continuing in Ukraine. Spring wheat has been sown on almost 98% of the planned area,” the ministry said.
Winter crops were sown on 7.7 million hectares in 2021, including 6.5 million hectares of wheat, one million hectares of barley, and 0.16 million hectares of rye.
As reported earlier, Ukraine will reduce the sowing of highly marginal crops (sunflower and corn) this year, while increasing the area under simpler crops that are more important for food security – peas, barley and oat.
Seems likely the Russians won’t be in a position to interfere with the harvest, either. Also, the Ukrainian government seems more focused on important things than our own.
The Federal Reserve has become increasingly concerned with “woke” issues like inequality and climate change. These concerns have distracted Fed officials from their core mission of price stability. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation hit 6.59 percent in March. The price level is now 4.6 percentage points higher than it would have been had the Fed hit its 2-percent target over the course of the pandemic. With inflation raging at the highest rate in 40 years, it is time to reexamine the Fed’s legitimate responsibilities.
Regarding monetary policy, a central bank has one—and only one— legitimate obligation: to maintain price stability via transparent activities that conform to the rule of law.
Actions inconsistent with long-run price stability reduce overall welfare. They also open the door for wealth to be diverted to special interests at the expense of the general public. This is the road to economic inefficiency, arbitrary wealth redistributions, politicization of monetary policy, and chaos.
The best service the Fed can provide is to singularly pursue a stable, transparent, and predictable monetary framework.
The Fed is a political creature and always has been. Abolish it and return to the gold standard or some other non-fiat currency.
A PARTY IN DENIAL: Everybody except Democrats sees inflation as the big issue. “In fact, nearly every demographic group agreed that inflation is the most important issue. Men (39%), women (28%), white people (36%), black people (21%), Hispanic people (36%), youngsters (29%), millennials (41%), baby boomers (39%), seniors (26%), white college graduates (34%), and white non-college graduates (37%) all agreed that inflation is the most important issue facing the country right now. The one group that didn’t agree? Democrats. For them, abortion (18%) is the most important issue facing the country right now. Inflation is in second place at just 14%, just barely ahead of election laws (13%) and climate change (10%).”
(08:27 AM)
PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY EXPLAINS ALL: “The idea of elite capture has been around for decades and typically describes how the most advantaged people in a group take control of benefits that are meant for everybody. Táíwò’s innovation is applying this idea to identity politics, the concept devised in 1977 by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. He argues that their project has been hijacked. ‘We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,’ they wrote, because organizing around what was good for people at the bottom of social hierarchies would be good for all oppressed people. But rather than using personal identity as an entry point to building radical coalitions, as these innovators intended, elites are using it as a tool to advance their own narrow interests.”
A local computer scientist and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has been named an A.M. Turing Award winner by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computer science.” It carries a million dollar prize.
“Oh, it was a complete shock. I’m still recovering from it,” Jack Dongarra told Knox News with a warm laugh. “It’s nice to see the work being recognized in this way but it couldn’t have happened without the support and contribution of many people over time.”
Chances are Dongarra’s work has touched your life, even if you don’t know it. If you’ve ever used a speech recognition program or looked at a weather forecast, you’re using technology that relies on Dongarra’s software libraries.
Dongarra has held a joint appointment at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 1989. While he doesn’t have a household name, his foundational work in computer science has undergirded the development of high-performance computers over the course of his 40-year career. . . .
Dongarra developed software to allow computers to use multiple processors simultaneously, and this is basically how all computer systems work today. Your laptop has multiple processing cores and might have an additional graphics processing core. Many phones have multiple processing cores.
“He’s continually rethought how to exploit today’s computer architectures and done so very effectively,” said Nicholas Higham a Royal Society research professor of applied mathematics at the University of Manchester. “He’s come up with ideas so that we can get the very best out of these machines.”
Dongarra also developed software that allowed computers with different hardware and operating systems to run in parallel, networking distant machines as a single computation device. This lets people make more powerful computers out of many smaller devices which helped develop cloud computing, running high-end applications over the internet.
Most of Dongarra’s work was published open-source through a project called Netlib.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden’s Formulagate Has a Third World Hell Hole Feel to It. “The monumental incompetence of everyone in the Biden administration is truly unprecedented. The two people at the top couldn’t figure out how to open a jar of spaghetti sauce without burning down a house and it just gets worse from there.”
THIS GUY IS A HERO: Navy Lt. Bill Mosely refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as ordered by his superiors, according to Just the News. He could have filed a religious exemption request, or, having served 22 years, taken his retirement and left the military. Instead, he retained a lawyer and appealed through the chain of command to a Navy Separation Board.
The board, composed of three Navy officers, found unanimously that Mosely should be retained as a Naval officer. His attorney argued before the board that the order to take the vaccine was illegal and should not be enforced. Let us pray that Mosely is strong evidence the spirit of American independence remains alive and strong in the ranks of the U.S. military.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MATERIALS SCIENCE IS UNDERRATED: Long-hypothesized ‘next generation wonder material’ created for first time. “Graphyne has long been of interest to scientists because of its similarities to the “wonder material” graphene—another form of carbon that is highly valued by industry whose research was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. However, despite decades of work and theorizing, only a few fragments have ever been created before now.”
UPDATE: After 100 Monkeypox Cases Reported in Europe, WHO Calls Emergency Meeting. “Monkeypox causes a wide array of symptoms (headaches, muscle aches, fever), but is most noted for skin lesions that are usually seen after 1 7-14 day incubation period. Normally, there are few cases detected outside of Africa. That was, until 2022.”
(04:04 PM)
‘WOKE’ FED FUELS INFLATION: Professors Nicholas Curott and James McClure, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, point to the Federal Reserve’s increasing preoccupation with issues like economic equity and climate change as a key factor in the board’s taking it’s eye off its core mission of maintaining price stability.
12 WAYS INTELLIGENT DESIGN INSPIRES SCIENCE PROGRESS: Casey Luskin’s 12-part series on HillFaith ends today with a dozen examples of how ID encourages science progress. If you missed some of the installments, links to the entire series are in one place here.
The supposed issue revolves around the age difference at the time the movie was filmed between leading lady Laura Dern and leading man Sam Neill. According to an interview in the Sunday Times’ Culture section with the actor and actress, that’s now an example of the toxic patriarchy.
The Sunday Times noted that “Laura Dern was 23 when she starred in Jurassic Park with Sam Neill, who is 20 years older.”
I’ll admit to being completely confused by this. How is it the patriarchy to have a younger woman making millions of dollars to be a star in a movie that is co-starred by an older man? Is the suggestion here that she shouldn’t have ever been given the role? That seems rather silly and self-defeating. Of course, she’s only saying this 29 years later, after she’s been made fabulously wealthy by the long-running popularity of “Jurassic Park.”
Besides, when you are casting, you are casting for the part, not who the actor/actress may or may not be in real life. On the other side of this debate, older women are often cast to play younger women. Is that out of bounds now? And as to Dern, she played a character who was an accomplished P.hD in her field. She presented as someone in her early 30s in the movie, both in her stated experience and her appearance. Even still, in the film itself, Dern wasn’t even in a relationship with Neill’s character.
So again, what exactly is the problem here? It’s now the patriarchy when a younger woman is cast to play opposite an older man? Dern cites this “moment of cultural awareness,” but I’d suggest this is just the ultimate example of inventing victimhood out of thin air. A 23-year-old getting rich starring in a movie is not a victim.
Considering that Cary Grant was 58 and Audrey Hepburn was 33 when they filmed Charade in 1963, better buy a copy on Blu-Ray before that once-classic film gets memory-holed as well.
SHOCKER: Marijuana vaping rises sharply among U.S. teens. “At the same time, the proportion of kids who smoke marijuana declined. In essence, vaping seemed to be replacing smoking, according to lead researcher Katherine Keyes, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.”
(12:45 PM)
WHO YOU GONNA CALL? Touring Ray Parker Jr.’s Epic Home Studio:
(12:30 PM)
GOOD AND HARD, AUSTRALIA: ‘Greenslide’ in Oz Dumps Scott Morrison. “Unfortunately, we now have a Labor government committed to a 43 percent reduction in emissions by 2030, with up to twelve Greens and green-minded independents in the parliament who think much more ambitiously. They variously want something between sixty and seventy-five percent. Meanwhile the Liberals are tortured. Should they try to outbid the Teals next time to get those blue-ribbon seats back? Hold on, there’s no outbidding the Teals. Should they then try for those working-class outer-suburban seats, which they’ve never won, by going back to traditional conservative values and common sense? A Trumpian strategy. Seems farfetched. There will be no path back for the Liberals, while “climate change” is the cause du jour.”
(12:14 PM)
BERLIN AIRLIFT IN REVERSE: U.S. Flying Baby Formula From Germany. “There’s some irony in the news today about U.S. military planes flying baby formula from Germany to Indiana. Only this time, the threat isn’t from a foreign power. The threat is from the criminal incompetence of the Biden administration, which ignored the baby formula crisis for months until the media began to report on it.”
UPDATE: As Hot Air’s Allahpundit noted last week, “America doesn’t need a mind-reader as president. It needs a Wall Street Journal reader. Per Jim Geraghty, the Journal had a story about the formula shortage back on … January 12.” And if the Journal is too right-leaning for Brandon’s White House, their cheerleaders at CNN were running articles on baby formula shortages as early as November 16th of last year: Baby formula is getting harder to find.
Imagine being a parent on a budget, down to your last container of formula: You drive to four different grocery stores, two Wal-Marts, a Target and a Rite-Aid, racking up more than 60 miles in pursuit of nourishment for your child. You not only have zero luck finding anything to feed your baby; you have also used up a lot of gas.
Along that drive you likely also saw significant evidence of a drug problem — either in the gaunt, vacant faces on people walking along Main Street or the batch of new treatment centers that have popped up where they’d never been before — and you might begin to wonder: ‘When was the last time anyone in power has seen what’s going on in our communities?’
Meanwhile, it was recently reported the Biden White House spent six months coming up with the nickname “Ultra MAGA” to go after Republican candidates.
The people who run strategy for the White House seem to have forgotten how to place themselves in voters’ shoes and experience everyday problems that impact families and communities. For them it is nothing but political calculation: They went to strategy school, not governing school.
Youngstown State University professor Paul Sracic says Biden has become a sort of anti-Harry Truman: “Where Truman insisted ‘The buck stops here,’ Biden is constantly trying to shift blame onto others; from Putin to ‘ultra-MAGA’ Republicans, Biden is hoping that Americans don’t hold him and his party responsible for things like inflation, the baby milk shortage, or the border crisis.”
Mr. Biden’s calculation, Mr. Sracic says, will not work.
Truman’s phrase was not an offer to take responsibility, but an acknowledgement of reality: When things go well in America, the president gets credit, and when they go wrong, he also gets credit.
“With parents scrambling to track down formula following the collision of supply chain issues and a massive recall, they want answers on how this could happen with such a life-critical product,” said Mr. Sracic.
If you are not convinced this is a very real thing, go spend ten minutes in the baby aisle in any store across the country that has empty shelves; see the crestfallen faces of many working-class and minority parents — who don’t have the wherewithal to purchase cases online from Europe — and it’s hard not to imagine the hopelessness and instability they feel in that moment.
I take it there is no dispute that Sabatini’s and Knouse’s “fling” was consensual. Rather, Knouse now says that Sabatini “groomed” her into a sexual relationship. It’s a novel theory, but let’s do the math. Sabatini is now 54 years old, and Knouse is 21 years his junior. Their consensual relationship began in 2018. So Knouse would have been 29 years old–a little long in the tooth for “grooming.”
Currently, there is a battle going on in Florida over grooming of 5 to 8 year olds in the public schools, where some teachers want to instruct small children in deviant sexual practices. Liberals vehemently oppose any bans on such grooming. On the other hand, liberals say, “grooming” of a 29-year-old scientist? Outrageous! Ban the groomer for life!
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The liberals’ underlying assumption is that women can never be adults. No matter how old they may be, no matter how many graduate degrees they may amass, women are never free actors. They can only, ever, be playthings in the hands of men. Do you believe that? Probably not, but that is what liberals think, and our culture is awash in such nonsense.
But all of this presupposes that the left has any biologists available who can answer another burning question of 2022: What is a woman?
(07:00 AM)
FROM A FRIEND: “They especially hate Elon because he laughs at them, and that is one of my favorite things about him.”
