Jennifer Jacobs
@JenniferJJacobs
Scoop: Biden admin is weighing a plan to release roughly A MILLION BARRELS OF OIL A DAY from U.S. reserves, for several months, to combat rising gasoline prices and supply shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sources tell @AlbertoNardelli @SalehaMohsin and me.
8:15 PM · Mar 30, 2022

For context, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Releasing one million barrels a day would translate to a savings of about 18 cents a gallon off the national average if it translated directly to the price of gas. It won’t, though. Much of the oil held by the government is no longer useable domestically because of environmental regulations. Instead, any oil released would be dumped into countries like China and India. That could possibly make a small dent in the global price of oil, but when you consider that the world produces 76 million barrels of oil a day, that one million barrels suddenly becomes even more irrelevant.

In other words, Biden’s ploy is completely useless. It’s also dangerous in that the strategic reserves exist to supply years of oil to the United States in the event of some kind of isolating event. They also exist for military use if oil can’t be otherwise garnered while fighting a war. Again, we are talking preparation for apocalyptic-type events, not gas prices being too high because of the left’s self-defeating green agenda.

Further, the Defense Production Act is not at all designed to operate as a communism cheat code for presidents who are too stubborn to change their damaging energy policies. If it’s not profitable now for American companies to go gangbusters producing “green energy,” it won’t be just because Biden makes them. Such a move would also spur more inflation as the supply of the products those companies originally produced will be reduced in order to make things Americans don’t currently want to buy. //

So let’s drain our strategic oil reserves and go full USSR on American companies. What could possibly go wrong?

People like Rogan — and me — cannot afford the mental bandwidth needed to logic out every possible response to every word we utter and then plan our speech according to those possibilities. If we can’t speak from the heart, and our own curiosity, we can’t encourage anyone to respond from the heart. Even the pouncing progressives would agree that being “emotionally honest” about something is a huge part of any meaningful discussion. They’ve been putting feelings over facts for years now. By their own measure, audiences cannot engage their feelings on an issue if they’re not being met with the honest feelings of the personality opining on the issue. Chilling the speech of the speakers chills all speech.

That is the goal, of course. To squash discussion and replace it with pre-formed ideas, given to you by the intellectual elite and their less-intellectual culture minions. You can’t respond to a bad idea you’re not allowed to hear in the first place. They don’t want our responses to their bad ideas.

That’s what makes places like RedState special…and guys like Rogan special. We do want your responses to our ideas. We do want emotion and rage and applause and laughter. We welcome the hate clicks as much as the love clicks. They all pay the same, but even better, they serve a function that we’re all on board with on the non-progressive political spectrum. They foster discussion. In this business, honesty makes for quality content.

Have you ever wondered why the production value of your tv and movies seems to have dropped lately? It’s because the number of calculations executives and their creative partners are required to make these days about possible responses, boycotts, hurt feelings, and social media backlash forces them to think more like machines and less like thinking, feeling human beings. //

Chilling speech on the world wide web, particularly in this nation, is effectively dumbing down entertainment quality. Worse than that, it’s making machines out of humans, at a time when we need much more humanity in this world.

Putting aside, for a moment, the fact that the people behind this assessment were the same ones that aided and abetted the Russia Hoax perpetrated against President Trump and who declared Hunter Biden’s laptop to be a Russian provocation is any part of this story plausible were it told by people capable of telling the truth?

Is it plausible that the entire Russian government was terrified to tell the emperor about his new wardrobe? I suppose, but if so, it speaks to an incredible level of self-delusion. I’m willing to credit that he was fed horsecrap on the operational abilities of the Russian Army because armies tend to lie about their readiness unless there is a system to enforce the rules, and there is not an ethic of lying on reports in the officer corps. I’m much less inclined to believe that he hasn’t been intensely monitoring Western sanctions as he whines about them so much. I also find it difficult to believe that Putin, the very “reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter” kind of guy described in the story, could give a public order that conscripts would not be used in combat and someone down the chain-of-command would have the cojones to say, “Igor, I don’t care that you are a conscript and I don’t care what Putin says, I’m telling you to get on the f***ing truck.” That makes no sense to me.

Even if we accept that the Russian military lied through its teeth about its capabilities to its political masters or even the upper ranks, we still have to wrestle with the idea that Putin doesn’t have any idea about what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, especially about casualties. //

Making the story less credible is that his evaluation of the situation was leaked now. Why now? Why not two weeks ago when the same information was available?

All in all, this intel leak seems to have another purpose. It is almost like they are giving Putin a pass for everything because his staff lied to him. Consider it to be an off-ramp to facilitate negotiations. It gives him the ability to purge the senior ranks of the military and bureaucracy by blaming them for both the crap intelligence and the disastrous plan. Then he’s only left with responsibility for the idea.