Monthly Archives: August 2022

Turley is Right

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He’s also wrong. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, in his op-ed regarding AG Merrick Garland’s dishonest (my term) leaks about the DoJ/FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago wrote, in part,

Someone is clearly lying. The Trump Team said that it was cooperating and would have given access to the government if it raised further objections. The Justice Department has clearly indicated that time was of the essence to justify this unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly waited for weeks to sign off on the application for a warrant and the FBI then waited a weekend to execute that warrant. It is difficult to understand why such communications could not be released in a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

Someone clearly is lying. One of the someones is empirically demonstrated to be Merrick Garland. Time plainly was not of the essence with those blatant, carefully considered delays in getting the warrant and then in actually executing it.

Whether Trump is also lying—both could be; press pontifications notwithstanding, this is not an either/or situation—could be just as empirically demonstrated: release the affidavit, wholly unredacted. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart surely has a copy in the court records that he could release should Garland continue to be intractable. That Trump is calling for the affidavit’s unredacted release is indicative of whether he’s lying. That Garland is resisting the affidavit’s release, even in redacted form, also is indicative of whether Trump is lying.

But Turley also is wrong.  [R]elease[]…a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

There are no “more sensitive” sections in the affidavit. There are no serious investigations that could be compromised by release of the unredacted affidavit. None in progress by an FBI that routinely lied to the FISA courts to get secret warrants. None by an FBI that falsifies evidence in pursuit of warrants. None by an FBI that colluded in the manufacture of a Russia collusion hoax by trading on a fake dossier. None by an FBI that attempted entrapment by faking a kidnap-the-Governor case.

The CDC and Its Proposed Corrections

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Dr Marty Makary is on the right track in his op-ed regarding CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s supposed mea culpa and claimed plans for corrective action in the future. His suggestions for corrective action include

  • stop pushing boosters on teenagers
  • ask colleges to remove their booster mandates
  • ask the Philadelphia school district to remove masks on students
  • tell the government-funded Head Start program to stop requiring all children ages 2 and up to wear masks
  • acknowledge that the Pfizer COVID vaccine for babies and toddlers was recommended by the agency even though the clinical trial found no statistically significant efficacy
  • apologize for being complicit in the human rights violation that was the banning of Americans to visit their dying loved ones in the hospital for most of the pandemic

Those are all fine actions, but they’re inadequate by themselves and mostly empty chit-chat: they do nothing to force the CDC to follow actual science and not the science rumor of the day. They do nothing to make the CDC be transparent about the science they claim to be following by publishing the raw data underlying CDC claims and “recommendations” and identifying the sources of those data and the researcher(s) and research institution(s) that collected those data.

In the end, though, such steps are for the CDC’s personnel replacements to take, after the incumbents have been terminated, from Walensky on down. Neither she nor hers can be trusted to do anything substantive in the way of corrective action.

Logistics Matters…

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…far beyond the process of getting soldiers and consumables to a battlefield and to the battlers.

In the aftermath of Germany’s—and much of Europe’s—considered decision to make themselves dependent on Russian natural gas and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s equally considered decision to limit and cut off natural gas supplies to Europe to try to coerce behaviors acceptable to Putin, Germany, et al., are (re)discovering the need for better logistics and logistical execution.  The lessons are available to the US, too, if the government is willing to learn.

Europe’s energy crisis has unleashed a global battle over natural-gas tankers….

And [emphasis added]

European countries ramped up their purchases of liquefied natural gas from the US, Qatar, and other sources this year as Russia cut supplies to the continent. They are competing with peers in South Korea and Japan—where gas demand has surged during a heat wave—for a finite amount of supply ferried by a limited number of vessels.

LNG-capable tankers are long-lead items that take specialized equipment to keep the natural gas cooled and under pressure. They’re also expensive, hence the interest in only limited inventories of such ships—they’re expensive even simply to have, if they’re just sitting around in port unused.

It’s not just the complexity of the ships, though, that contribute to the present long-lead times.

Shipmakers in South Korea, the world’s biggest producer of LNG tankers, don’t have free capacity for new orders until 2027[.]

However, the wonders of Europe have known for some time that they needed more LNG tankers.

LNG and the tankers that carry the fuel were in high demand even before the conflict, as extreme weather curtailed hydropower, and many economies sought to ditch coal to reduce carbon emissions.

The complexity of these logistics is further illustrated by this little fillip: the price of steel is rapidly rising, an accelerated increase driven by demand from a broad reach of needs in addition to simply making boats.

The lessons for the US?

The need for more natural gas (and oil) production, more flexible production, better and expanded distribution grids to refiners, and in the present context, expansion of port facilities able to convert natural gas to liquid natural gas and then to transfer that LNG to LNG-capable tankers.

And maybe build some of our own LNG tankers. And get rid of the Jones Act.

Equilibrium

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Laura Secor had a Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview with Henry Kissinger, and a number of letter writers in the WSJ‘s Letters commented on Kissinger’s espousal of a need for some sort of equilibrium among the world’s powers as the means of world stability (redundancy deliberate).

Kissinger operates from a false premise—the need for international equilibrium.

An equilibrium that balances American enemies—Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Iran, even northern Korea—with American national security is dangerously detrimental to American national security.

We—to use Khruschev’s phrasing—buried the Soviet Union, and we did it entirely peacefully by being superior to it in every meaningful way, and exploiting those superiorities aggressively in the economic sphere in the end game. We would have won that contest much sooner had we been more aggressive much earlier, but in those earlier years we were stuck with the likes of Kissinger and former President Jimmy Carter (D).

We have only to return to that aggressiveness in order to continue securing our safety and weal. And to achieve the only equilibrium that’s even remotely safe for us.