Author Archives: eehines

A Thought on Oil

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The surviving governing mullahs in Iran have moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, impacting global oil flows and prices. The US has moved to continue destroying Iran’s military capability (along with Israel’s moves against Iran’s government and military officials), but shorter range drones and mines can functionally close the Strait for some time to come.

The US has asked its allies, especially those of Europe, for help in reopening the Strait and holding it open. Europe’s navies, after all, have more, and more experienced, anti-mine capabilities than ours does.

They refused initially, and are foot dragging presently.

That brings up my thought on oil flows in the Arabian Gulf and through the Strait. Iran’s oil exports are continuing apace, on Iranian oil tankers, and it already has some 50 days’ worth of oil on tankers in the seas around Singapore and quite a bit more in transit or on floating storage vessels. Iran also has just two oil exporting ports available to it: Kharg Island, in the northern reaches of the Gulf, from which 90% of Iran’s oil and natural gas exports are shipped, and at Bandar-e-Jask, just outside the Strait, from which the rest of Iran’s oil and natural gas are shipped.

One US move would be to stop Iranian oil exports altogether. Destroy the oil jetty on Kharg so oil and natural as present on the island can’t be moved offshore, and destroy the port at Bandar-e-Jask so oil and natural gas can’t be exported from there, either. In anticipation of a more peaceable government in future, it likely would be sufficient to destroy the pipelines entering and leaving those facilities. With Iran at war with us for the last 50-ish years and with us, alongside Israel, against whom Iran has been warring for just long, finally shooting back, Iranian ships and storage facilities are legitimate targets. We should seize and sequester Iran’s tankers at sea, with the possible exception of those tankers actually within Singapore’s territorial waters, along with its floating storage sites, sell the oil to other customers, and sell the seized ships and floating storage sites or send them to the breakers.

One more move: the US Navy could begin escorting convoys of oil tankers and other cargo ships through the Strait, except for the tankers and cargo shipping bound for Europe. Those nations continue to insist on freeloading off US blood and treasure while doing nothing for themselves. Let them pay the price of their freeloading or pick up their responsibility for escorting those vessels.

Mistaken Responsibility

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote of the need for cooperation in the American-Israeli war against Iran. He was right that the war would benefit from the cooperation of serious players. He had this, though, on that war:

Making the case to other nations helps legitimize the mission and its necessity.

This is the letter-writer’s misapprehension. The legitimacy of the mission and its necessity is inherent in that mission: Iran is the world’s moneybags for terrorists and terrorist activities, the most significant of which are Iran’s satraps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, which it would promptly use to erase Israel and to peddle to terrorists for use outside the Middle East. Iran is bent on building ICBMs with which to shoot its nuclear bombs at us.

The mission is the elimination of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, the elimination of Iran’s ability to build missiles of any reach, the elimination of Iran’s ability to fund or otherwise support other terrorists anywhere. Those efforts have been badly damaged by the actions of last summer and, so far, the current mission.

This war has cooperation between the serious players: the US and Israel. Natterers, including the British PM and the German Chancellor, though, are not at all serious players.

The responsibility for cooperating with the US and Israel and joining the mission lies solely with those “other nations.” Their decisions to remain absent, to shirk their responsibility to Europe for the restoration of oil and natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, says volumes about their alleged reliability in any crisis.

So far, Japan has signed on to assist with reopening the Strait of Hormuz amid the war with Iran. So, lately, have France, Germany, Italy, and Netherlands after their initial reluctance. The five nations’ joint statement can be read here. The TL;DR is this:

We condemn in the strongest terms recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations, and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces.
…
We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.

Whatever “appropriate effort” means. “Preparatory planning” is just a weasel-word phrase meaning “but we’re in no hurry to do anything more than shake our fingers in the strongest terms.”

Japan’s assistance likely will be concrete; the units they send would gain valuable experience when the People’s Republic of China attacks the Republic of China and Japan needs to respond in answer of its commitment to RoC and to protect its South and East China Seas holdings. Those European nations? They’ll be busy hiding behind their definition of “appropriate effort” while they endlessly plan.

Black Boxes

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Folks buying into a private lending fund are learning, I trust, a valuable lesson, and the rest of us should take that lesson to heart, also. This is especially the case when the fund restricts withdrawals. The fund singled out by The Wall Street Journal for its example is Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund.

Investors are fleeing the $42 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, among the latest of its kind to limit redemptions for shareholders. Many investors appear to believe the private-credit fund’s official net asset value is inflated, prompting them to sell their shares, or try to.
One reason many are rushing for the exits: it can be difficult for shareholders to understand what they own. The disclosures at funds like this often are as impenetrable as they are voluminous.

If the claims are not independently verifiable, including by a potential investor, they are not reliable, and a potential investor should not invest.

This, though, is not an excuse for Government to step in and “regulate.” Caveat emptor; investors, like any other American, ought to face the consequences—good or bad—of their decisions on their own, without government taking tastes from successes or doing bailouts for failures.

AI Isn’t all that I

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And it’s unlikely to be so anytime soon.

A human brain contains 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections. That’s a thousand, or more, connections per neuron. A human brain’s cortex alone contains approximately 20 billion neocortical neurons, with an average of 7,000 synaptic connections each (primary source). The cerebral cortex has about 0.15 quadrillion synapses—or about a trillion synapses per cubic centimeter of cortex. More, the brain uses all of 20 watts of power to function fully. That works out to a vanishingly tiny amount of wattage per synapse (that’s 0 decimal point 12 zeros and a 2 at the end).

Intel’s latest AI-supportive chip suite (as of April 2024, anyway) supports up to 1.15 billion neurons and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores[.] That’s a bit over 110 “synapses” per “neuron.” The setup uses 2,600 watts at max function. That works out to 0 decimal point 7 zeros and a 2. Which is five orders of magnitude more power drain per “synapse” for the chip than for our brain.

Artificial Intelligence isn’t all that. It may well get there, but not tomorrow.

Social Services Fraud

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Minnesota’s social services fraud has been going on for years. Faye Bernstein used to work in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services as a compliance officer, but when she started identifying the level of fraud and the lack of controls with which to prevent the fraud and to address it when it did occur in 2019, she started being cut out, slandered, and ultimately forced out.

Since the situation has started getting ovetly addressed, nearly 100 people have been charged…. Two-thirds have been convicted so far in multiple interconnected schemes.

Most of those, though are soldiers, with maybe a made man or two thrown in as scapegoat distractions. It’s really necessary to go after the social services syndicate’s capos along with the capo di tutti i capi, which likely include Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and his syndicate concierge, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison. If those last two are, in fact, involved, and if they are brought down, two things would result: the Feds would know better how to identify and stop this sort of fraud and jail the perpetrators, and other States might start taking their social services responsibilities more seriously.