HALF-FULL REPORT 04/14/23

Another Animal Feeding Facility Explosion

Feedlot, Food Production, Agricultural Fires

Quite a few fires have broken out at animal feedlots over the past few years, with a Texas dairy operation exploding and burning at least 18,000 animals to death this week. From my personal experience measuring air quality in and around these facilities, known as Large Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or LCAFO, and operating under the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits, or NPDES, the facilities use anaerobic wastewater lagoons to prevent runoff. The lagoons or sometimes tanks treat chicken, cow, or hog manure with microbes. Obama-era legislation mandated the construction of these systems as a way to control water pollution.

The problems start with the anaerobic part as microbes digest the animal waste in digesters-something like a giant septic tank. At large scale, methane is produced in significant volumes as an odorless, colorless, and very flammable gas. Disturbing the sludge within the anaerobic digesters causes the methane to bubble out of the tanks violently.

If the methane finds an ignition source, a fire is certain; maybe even a powerful explosion starts things off with a boom.

The technology is flawed because the feedlots do not have flares to burn off the methane or the type of staff trained to monitor and control these systems.

In short, our EPA mandated – rammed through – an environmental control strategy for large animal feeding operations suitable for use with smaller operations. Waste treatment falls under the chemical engineering field and is subject to the same limitations faced everywhere. Scaling-up technologies can often be complex because the underlying process dynamics are not linear.

It is starting to look like the national animal feedlot industry was forced to install technology that is either too difficult to operate safely or is not designed to accommodate sudden methane surges from the teeming depths of the digesters.

This is a whopping big problem and likely beyond the capability of the Biden Administration to address.

It’s not that anaerobic technology at scale cannot work. It does and does so every day and all over the world. Instead, the standards mandated by the EPA appear to have led to the installation of faulty plants and equipment on a broad scale. Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa M. Jackson, was so preoccupied with environmental justice that previously well-understood scientific and engineering principles were ignored.

The exploding feedlot problem is a harbinger of the failing windmill and solar farm problem and is related to the mRNA vaccine rolling catastrophe.

It is one thing for the government to mandate technologies and pick winners in a universe of perfect knowledge. It is quite another for government to exhibit the pretense of knowledge as the result of a committee meeting among academic types.

How the exploding feedlot problem is resolved matters as the other government-mandated malinvestments in energy and infrastructure must also be corrected. Where will the funds come from? Where will the political will come from to demand that the EPA and DoE unwind their imaginary science and engineering schemes?

RE-Industrialization

The United States has been shuttering heavy industry since 1992 and NAFTA and turning a blind eye to the economic collapse of the nation’s center. This, and the frustration it causes, drives the Trump political machine.

The finance industry has ridden the de-industrialization wave, as national profits are now primarily made in trade and restructuring debt. The financial sector was and remains the greatest adversary of re-industrializing the United States. Think of it as a mafia that wants to prevent another operator from setting up shop on its turf.

But times might be changing. The war in Ukraine and growing conflicts with China are impeding the free flow of energy and manufactured goods to such an extent that Germany’s great industrial plants are closing or closed. Japan is offshoring production to energy-rich locals, and Germany is forced to do the same.

BASF is attempting to massively expand its operations in Geismar and Vidalia, Louisiana, to produce chemicals from natural gas essential to German industry. Heavy industry worldwide is suddenly interested in the Gulf Coast because natural gas is available, the United States Military protects infrastructure, and maintenance services are generally available.

The movement of energy-intensive industries from Europe to the Gulf Coast could become a stampede. Electric cars are manufactured from a silicon-aluminum base that requires bauxite from Jamaica and Venezuela to be calcined in large furnaces before separating the aluminum from the oxide. Then the aluminum must be smelted with silicon to form a light, stiff material for casting into the vehicle’s structural members. This all requires ports, ships, trains, trucks, and chains of smokestack-type factories.

This is just for the aluminum, as about ten tons of CO2 are required to make the aluminum chassis in a typical Tesla. We aren’t even talking about the batteries and their industrial base requirement.

Most importantly, it requires skilled labor. Sure, unskilled immigrant labor can be used to load trucks, but operating sophisticated metal refining operations is altogether different.

Even more vital is the availability of air and water discharge permits that will allow heavy industry to return to the United States. Each state is responsible for administering the licenses, but the underlying laws are the domain of the federal EPA. This is the same EPA that ignored established science and engineering under the direction of political extremists like Lisa Jackson. The USA is threatened with food shortages because its mandated sludge digesters keep blowing up.

The United States is standing at a crossroads between re-industrialization and sustained economic prosperity for millions or the continued slide into inflation, unemployment, and growing political rage. Even worse, if worse is possible, is the inability of the defense industry to meet its production needs under the present self-imposed EPA limitations.

We cannot smelt the lead necessary to produce bullets in the United States today. We can only repurpose lead from old car batteries or import lead from China.

We are fast approaching the critical point where national security is being held hostage by the EPA, and real economic growth is blocked through policies pushed by the finance industry. In other words, we are reaching the point where the Soros-BlackRock cartel might be more than just the gay-tranny-wussy masters of the universe and morph into actual state enemies.

Re-industrialization along the Gulf Coast is now a matter of national security and will soon be a NATO priority. Men in black will likely meet with EPA administrators soon and explain how things will work from now on.

The bottom line is clear. Globalization is spent. Finance overplayed its hand, and inflation is starting to roar. Industrial assembly can be competently performed in Mexico, Columbia, or Indiana. But the heavy stuff, the steel mills and big chemical plants that apply heat and rearrange molecules, need to move to the United States Gulf Coast as quickly as possible. There is no choice, especially as Brazil is now a communist country.

Any candidate in opposition will not be allowed to win the 2024 election.

Pentagon Papers

Speaking of national security. What the hell?

Classified documents generally critical of the war in Ukraine were released via an internet chatroom. The alleged perp is a straight white male, which means he will be given life in prison, unlike tranny Bradly Manning who was released as part of the democrat policy of excusing all crimes committed by men wearing dresses.

Watch the double standard unfold with this case…

But anyhow, a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman in his early 20s, Jack Teixeira, an enlisted airman with the rank of E-3, allegedly had access to General Miley’s briefings concerning specifics of the war in Ukraine and the penetration of US Signals intelligence into foreign governments. The documents clarified that Signals Intel, presumably the NSA, was listening to Putin’s inner circle.

Further, the guy was described as a gun nut and white supremacist, so he would be doxed and eventually prosecuted fiercely and without question – and without mercy.

The details:

About a week ago, it was disclosed that an extensive slide deck or several slide decks from a classified Pentagon presentation were leaked to a private chatroom. Hundreds of briefing slides and possibly other documents were available to the obscure gaming and guns chatroom. Initially, the chatroom participants kept the material confidential and discussed incorporating the intel into games and game design.

The materials were not spread for weeks, maybe months, until the media was tipped off and instructed to have a look. Who tipped the media off?

Well, they did have a look and quickly disclosed the payload that American signals intelligence has infiltrated Putin’s inner circle. Other targets, such as South Koreans discussing artillery shells for Ukraine, were revealed, allegedly doctored Ukrainian and Russian troop casualties documents, and similar technicalities were released.

The whole story sounds a lot like the plot from the novel The Spike, where a newspaper editor repeatedly spikes classified information intended to be released via a stooge to impact a foreign adversary. Eventually, the editor is convinced.

The timing of the current release has pushed Biden’s disaster of incompetency in Ireland from the headlines. But other than this, it is unclear what the release means. The entire story sounds like a poorly executed psyop intended to taunt Putin and advance his possible paranoia and hostility toward his intelligence services.

And what did the leak disclose? That this is a hot war between the USA and Russia, and that Ukrainian losses are much larger than Russian losses. American troops are probably on the ground, but is this a surprise? I don’t think so, and not different from Russian troops on the ground during the Korean War

The Ukrainian losses are high, but so are Russian losses. The leak appears to  make a McNamara like argument that the war can be distilled to numbers. It cannot. Does anybody know the real body counts? I wonder.

It is clear, however, that if this was a planned media event and psyop, the organizers failed to realize that the chatroom members kept their mouths shut once they knew the information was classified. Somebody else went to the media after the chatroom failed to bring the material to light.

The whole story feels weird; it has the taint of fake news and manufactured intent. Something is wrong.

But not as Wrong as Budweiser

Yesterday’s Skye’s Links goes into the details behind the Soros and BlackRock-driven efforts to force corporations to go woke or lose access to commercial paper and bank loans. Soros has been known to send his goon squads to tear things up should a company resist the gay agenda.

It is not clear why George Soros and Larry Fink of BlackRock have such a deep hatred for women and belligerent support of all things homosexual and transvestite. Woke is causing severe financial harm to Disney and cost P&G at least $8 Billion with their Gillette brand. As of today, woke has driven losses for Anheuser Busch to $6.5 Billion and accelerating. P&G is going woke again by rolling out an Oil of Olay transvestite ad campaign next week.

The State Department claims that gay rights are the foundation of American foreign policy to cause rebellions in autocratic countries. Others believe Big Rainbow is being pushed to make room for the next generation of Democrats turning government so gay that Republicans never again run for office. Still, others claim that the big rainbow is a compassionate way to limit the global birthrate.

Whatever their motivations, the Budweiser catastrophe has made it clear that the agenda is far more anti-woman than pro-transvestite, and middle America is sick of it. Sixty years of women’s rights as a civil rights issue is now turned upside down as men don’t just enter the women’s locker rooms but dress in women’s clothing and makeup.

Feminists that fail to embrace the invasion are being hunted down and ambushed, as swimmer Riley Gains of San Francisco State University can testify. The government claims that the agenda is good for the 2% but omits that it is profoundly anti-women –51%.

The federal push for a big rainbow feels like that EPA mandate that forced poorly conceived sludge digesters into American animal feedlots. Things are starting to blow up.

Taxes

April 15 is everybody’s least favorite day of the year. Federal tax day. Democrats are testing the inclusion of a 401K, IRA, and social security tax increase plank into their 2024 presidential campaign platform. Their strategy is to turn the manufactured rage against the baby boomers for “stealing the national prosperity” extant before 1965. Heavily taxing 401ks and IRAs will be sold as taking back that which the boomers stole. The politics could become very ugly as ‘punch a Nazi” morphs into “punch a boomer.” Canadian-style euthanasia will undoubtedly be a Democrat goal by the decade’s end.

The hat trick that the Dems need to secure power for the next decade is to ramp up the rage and then present the elderly boomer as the greedy spawns of satan that stole the national wealth and stabbed the woke in the back.

Covid

Joe Biden declared the end of the Covid emergency this week while the CDC released warnings of the new Arcturas strain, a derivative of Omicron, “sweeping” the country. Somebody did not get the memo.

Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant to the Iron and Steel, Mining, Heavy Chemicals, and Fibers Industries.