China

Captioned Photo: It reminds me of China

 

Bullet Points:

** Mitt Romney (R-UT-ret) offers his opinion. Many would argue that he left the Senate as a traitor to his party and constituency.

** I didn’t know that USGOV paid people to untwist pretzels. That’s something that I excel at…and now the program is ending. DOGE has flushed another job opportunity.

** “It’s finally happening. The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, the behemoth of bureaucratic blundering and incinerated wildlife, is circling the drain. Once celebrated as a game-changer for renewable energy, it’s now being quietly escorted off the stage with a “nothing to see here, folks” attitude. After just 11 years of struggling to justify its existence, Ivanpah is headed for closure. Good riddance.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises.”

** Success doesn’t reward feelings. It rewards results. Money doesn’t care about you, and your tears won’t add value to a balance sheet. So wipe the tears, focus on the numbers, and return to work. – O’Leary

** Every print tells a story. Discover art with a soul. I’m dragging the sack for Jules.

** CNN and NBC News are reportedly preparing for significant layoffs this week, with hundreds of employees potentially affected.

** Earlier this month, the Taiwanese Coast Guard ran down another Chinese-owned ship that sailed over one of the few cables connecting Taiwan to the rest of the world just before it snapped. Chinese apps like TikTok and DeepSeek dominate headlines, but the battle for internet control is not only taking place in cyberspace.

** “Senior Officials Put on Leave after Physically Trying to Stop DOGE from Accessing Agency Systems: Two USAID officials, John Voorhees, and his deputy, were placed on leave late Saturday night after refusing to allow DOGE members access to USAID systems. After being denied entry, the DOGE members threatened to call the police physically. They were trying to access the security and personnel files.

Federal Officials are concerned that President Trump is trying to merge USAID with the US State Department to reduce Government corruption and bloat. USAID employs approximately 10,000 people, excluding contractors, with two-thirds overseas. Last week, 60 USAID members were put on leave after trying to circumvent President Trump’s executive order stopping foreign aid.

** ICE says, “Yes.” – Liberal panic.

** Are there any weapons in the vehicle? As a matter of fact, there are.

** “Slavery was not the true cause of the war. It was an element in the cause of the war, but it was not what the war was really fought about. The war was really fought about whether the federal government should dominate state government. In other words, it was basically states rights…”- Shelby Foote  — I agree with the late Mr. Foote, a great historian and human being. The seeds of the conflict began with the Constitution, and that will be born out in the series I’m writing, which is told from the perspective of a Northerner.

** Jules says there’s madness in the air.

** Investments – America keeps winning.

** What is the word of the day?

 

Oil

The amount of crude oil produced in U.S. refineries greatly exceeds U.S. crude oil production. The United States produces a record amount of crude oil (~13.4 million barrels per day), while U.S. refineries need about 16.5 million barrels daily to maintain current production levels. [Mish

Note: We produce about 81 percent of what we need on a volume basis.

About 60% of the crude oil that runs through U.S. refineries is extracted at home. Many refineries need heavier crude oil to maximize the flexibility of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel production. Because of that, most crude oil produced in the United States is light, including much of what’s produced in the Permian and Bakken. Light crudes are not good replacements for the heavy crude oil we get from Canada and Mexico.

Re-tooling refineries to process solely U.S. crude oil (light crude) would cost billions — a risky investment that would take decades to permit, construct, and eventually pay off. We lack the infrastructure (like pipelines) needed to supply U.S. crude oil and refined products to every region cost-effectively. Even if the economics of re-tooling our facilities

Why do U.S. refineries run on heavier crude oils that we need to import? Long before the U.S. shale boom, when global production of light sweet crude oil was declining, we made significant investments in our refineries to process heavier, high-sulfur crude oils that were more widely available in the global market. These investments ensured U.S. refineries had access to the feedstocks needed to produce gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Heavier crude is now an essential feedstock for many U.S. refineries.

Substituting it for U.S. light sweet crude oil would make these facilities less efficient and competitive, leading to a decline in fuel production and higher consumer costs. Refineries run on a mix of crude oils in order to run efficiently and maximize outputs. More than 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude. Because heavier crude is more difficult to process, it tends to trade at a discount to light crude.

All of the above points are from the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM)

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Shale oil is getting lighter and lighter as time passes, making it even harder to use in our refineries. The amount of water used in fracking is getting harder to deal with. A better solution might be to build a couple of brand new refineries that could process light shale oil close to the current producing regions.

Perhaps President Trump could make this happen. However, by the time the refineries are built in 5-10 years, President Trump will be gone.

What Will US Refiners Do? US refiners will use the cheapest oil they can get. If that is from Canada, then production costs on those imports will rise by 10 percent, and the price of gasoline will increase, too. US importers, not Canada and Mexico, will take the hit. But that is not as bad as it might seem at first glance because ~60% of the crude oil that runs through U.S. refineries is extracted in the U.S. A 10 percent increase on 40 percent is effectively 4 percent, but that is not spread uniformly.

The more a refiner depends on Canadian oil, the bigger the hit to that refiner.

 

On the Western Front

Baron Manfred von Richthofen with his father, Major Albrecht Philipp Karl Julius Freiherr von Richthofen, after being wounded at the front in 1917. Yesterday, my grandson thought a German pilot had founded a popular pizza outlet. Please help me. It speaks to a private school education where his parents paid a lot of money to send him.

 

Air Strikes

“In apparent continuity with the GWOT era of the prior two decades, the Trump White House has announced the president ordered a wave of airstrikes on Islamic State cells in Somalia on Saturday, in the very first US strikes abroad since Donald Trump entered his second term.

The Pentagon announced that “multiple” terrorists were killed and that it further assessed no civilians were harmed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the US Africa Command carried out the strikes directed by Trump as Commander-in-Chief. Trump on social media hailed that the attacks destroyed the “caves” that ISIS terrorists live in.

“The strikes destroyed the caves they live in and killed many terrorists without, in any way, harming civilians. Our Military has targeted this ISIS Attack Planner for years, but Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to get the job done. I did!” Trump wrote.”

 

Tariffs

They are undeniably a consumption tax falling primarily on the end consumer and, absent other tax cuts, are a net transfer of capital from the private sector to the less efficient and less productive public sector.

The US enjoys a clear and often significant asymmetrical advantage in economic and financial terms over its trading partners. As such, tariffs can be an effective tool for extracting particular concessions. (If extracting specific, tactical concessions is your only goal.) To the extent any concessions advantageous to the US are realized, the episodic use of tariffs could be worth a little economic stress that doesn’t extend to the entire economy.

Tariffs are not a winning long-term strategy, but they can be used for short-term benefits, which President Trump is doing. Tariffs raise input costs for industries reliant on imports, such as automotive and construction, making U.S. products less domestically and globally competitive. The notion that everything should move “onshore” is neither practical nor economically desirable.

While tariffs can offer temporary protection to specific industries outside of short-term tactical trade concessions, they do not address the deeper structural issues needed to create a more competitive domestic manufacturing base.

***

From The Atlantic

(Article) … In Washington, this is an intensely local story. At the stations of everyday existence—the coffee shop, the gym, the bookstore—I keep encountering longtime civil servants who are either scrambling to leave their jobs or considering that possibility. They vent about how they can’t live in a state of terminal anxiety. Despite decades of demonstrable competence, they resent being treated as somehow derelict. Even lower-level bureaucrats dread being fired for once, having said the wrong thing at a conference. Some of them vow to stay, but their faces betray fear. I worry that they won’t resist the bullying.

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China and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)

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Identify the Aircraft

1

 

2

 

3

Can you tell the nationality without looking it up?

One more photo (below) to aid you.

 

4

 

5

 

 

 

Parting Shot

End