By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com

The Dutch government plans to close the Groningen gas field this year despite Europe’s precarious supply position. Groningen is the largest gas field in Europe.

The field is dangerous, a government official from the Hague told the Financial Times, and the government has no plans to boost production from it.

“We won’t open up more because of the safety issues,” Hans Vijbrief told the FT.

“It is politically totally unviable. But apart from that, I’m not going to do it because it means that you increase the chances of earthquakes, which I don’t want to be responsible for.”

Production from Groningen has been curtailed substantially, and there were plans in place to phase out production altogether because of increased seismic activity in the vicinity of the field even before the energy crisis began in 2021.

As gas prices began to climb in the autumn of 2021 and then took off in the spring of 2022, some began speculating that the Netherlands could keep the field operating to contribute to filling the gap in gas supply left by Russian pipeline deliveries.

The Dutch government was skeptical about that from the start and instead suggested production be extended, although at a minimum rate of some 2.8 billion cu m. Now, this, too, is being reconsidered.

“It’s very, very simple: everybody who has some knowledge of earthquake danger tells me that it’s really very dangerous to keep on producing there. I’m quite convinced it’s wise to close it down,” Vijbrief told the FT.

Since the 1980s, the FT notes, there have been some 100 earthquakes annually around Groningen, resulting in more than 150,000 claims for property damage. The operator of the field, a Shell-Exxon joint venture, was ordered to start reducing output in 2013 with a view to shutting the field down eventually.

Authored by Joakim Book via The Mises Institute,

The temptation and crucial flaw of a totalitarian mind are that everyone must play a part in a superstructural battle between good and evil. Standing on the sidelines or taking a neutral position on present topics is not allowed; one may not merely observe or ignore the madness played out among the power hungry.

As a not-so-proud carrier of a Swedish passport, I last year lost track of how many times I was asked about Sweden’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the overreaching military alliance among Western nations. Apparently, there was a war going on somewhere. NATO countries were scrambling, and Finland and Sweden (thoroughly Western social democratic countries) were decades-old NATO holdouts. I did not know; I took pride in not knowing.

The chattering classes and the corporate press were full-on politicking. An insider-diplomacy battle raged between Stockholm, Helsinki, and Washington, DC. At some point even, Ankara, Turkey, was involved. I did not know; I had no opinion. My friends, my colleagues, my neighbor, my barber, my friends’ friends, and various other acquaintances all wanted in on the sordid business of political commentating.

I did not know. That was exactly it. I had no position to offer, which I quickly realized was a social mistake in this brave new world of symbolic wars for all that is “good.” I did not know anything about military matters, defense capabilities, international relations, or threat assessments regarding the various countries involved. I did not live in any of the places previously mentioned. I had no interest in their nation-state status. I did not know what the implications of NATO membership were or why it concerned me. Politicians politick with or without my input.

Everyone needs a take; everyone needs to “be informed” on the grand, irrelevant events of our broken times. Everyone needs a flag in their profile picture—a not-so-grand gesture indicating that they support the “latest thing.”

Paraphrasing Murray Rothbard’s quote on economic ignorance, why should I politick “a loud and vociferous position” on the diplomatic/military questions that so many of my fellow humans keep asking me for?

On most current affairs, I imagine I am a little bit like most people; we have our own lives and our own interests to pay attention to. Everything else takes a backseat. Rather than play the hot-take-on-everything game, I just want to be a good libertarian and be left alone. Unfortunately, that does not fly in a politicized society flirting with totalitarianism. Society has lost its shared values and its unifying religious frameworks and instead elevated politics (as Friedrich Nietzsche’s old quote goes, “God is dead. . . . And we have killed him”).

F.A. Hayek taught us in his famous 1945 “The Use of Knowledge in Society” that market prices carry information. I do not need to know anything about faraway affairs. I am perfectly capable of reading gasoline prices, suffering electricity price shocks, or paying elevated prices at the grocery store. That is the beauty of a capitalist division of labor and a market system. We do not need top-down control. We do not need the chattering classes opining about what one owes, deserves, or ought to know. All we need is the reality of what we experience as market actors.

Like a good libertarian, I instead try to purge politics from my life; no watching the news. I only read slow news in quality magazines by authors I trust, and I routinely skip every topic that does not belong to my core interests. Life is too short. And as I have said in the past, the sum of “humanity’s current (and future) literary, statistic and economic treasure” is more valuable than the unexciting, outdated information that is tumbled, diluted, and filled with omissions, via my propaganda machine (sorry, TV news).

In what political scientists would consider apex “political ignorance,” I take pride in not being able to name the prime minister of my native Sweden or the rulers of the other lands in which I reside. I do not know, care, or want to elevate their theater into my cognitive space.

At a recent party, my team lost a trivia competition, partly because we could not name the United Kingdom’s last three prime ministers (They change so often that it is not worth learning their names.). When my father called on an eventful Sunday last fall, and in passing, mentioned that he had met an acquaintance at the voting booths, I learned for the first time that it was Election Day. Epic!

Twenty-five years ago, James Dale Davidson and William Rees wrote about the public’s relationship to politics and corrupt institutions in their long-lived treatise The Sovereign Individual:

Moral outrage against corrupt leaders is not an isolated historical phenomenon but a common precursor of change. It happens again and again whenever one era gives way to another. . . . This widespread revulsion comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible. (emphasis added)

Foreshadowing the rise of internet dominance, remote work, financial revolutions, and Bitcoin, the authors precociously reasoned about big-picture societal shifts of power. When technology allows, new societal constellations become available. Whether or not we grab onto them is up to us.

And all meaningful changes begin at home: fix that which you can fix, clean your room, etc. A flourishing future without politics requires us to purge from our lives the corrupting features of politics, which only enrage us and separate us from our fellow humans.

Politics is cancer, and the best you can do is to exit from it in every way you can.

China’s “North Pole” recorded its lowest temperature since records began.

The Chinese city of Mohe dropped to minus 53 degrees Celsius Sunday, according to China Daily, citing data from the country’s local weather bureau.

The frigid temperatures broke a previous record of minus 52.3 degrees Celsius. Temperatures have been below minus 50 degrees Celsius for three consequence days. 

“As a new round of extreme cold hit Heilongjiang, a number of areas in the Greater Khingan Range have recorded their coldest ever temperatures,” China Daily said. 

Extremely cold air from Siberia is moving south. North China (Mohe region) is reporting temperatures below -50 °C – one of the lowest during the measurement period: https://t.co/yZwIGCN7en 🥶 pic.twitter.com/gmjH25UF2g

— Ventusky (@Ventuskycom) January 22, 2023

Earlier this month, we pointed out a cold air mass swirling in the Arctic was shattering records. The rural northern Siberian town of Zhilinda recorded temperatures of minus 62.1 degrees Celsius. 

Arcfield Weather’s Paul Dorian explained recently that winter isn’t over and called for a significant change in North American weather. 

On Monday, the weather blog Severe Weather Europe outlined:

The Polar Vortex is starting to weaken as a strong Stratospheric Warming event is about to unfold. As the forecast indicates, the Polar Vortex will be heavily deformed but will not fully collapse. These important events can have a significant impact on the rest of winter in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Some meteorologists continue to tweet long-term weather models that suggest a polar vortex could result in colder weather for the US and Europe at the end of the month or early February. 

Not a piece or a sample, but the whole load #PolarVortex https://t.co/ipl1NiXdur pic.twitter.com/Nt9XdytGS8

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) January 21, 2023

Within two weeks the still strong polar vortex (Jan23 left) completely collapses by Feb8. Last year this happened in mid March, which has been followed by a massive surge in #natgas pic.twitter.com/0Yp5E2Ot6v

— Heinrich Leopold (@LeopoldHeinrich) January 23, 2023

Polar vortex winds emerging from the North Pole could mean freezing temperatures in the UK this February ❄ https://t.co/V65UzCcnDg

— ManchesterWorld (@MancWorldUK) January 22, 2023

When I dip, you dip… we dip! 🥶 #polarvortex explained… 👇 #BreakingItDownWithBrittney https://t.co/4a7shjW0TF pic.twitter.com/sD8ygq6u5q

— Brittney Merlot ⛈ (@MerlotsWeather) January 23, 2023

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Left-wing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently praised a visiting President Joe Biden:

“Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States – 40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!”

Why wouldn’t Obrador be delighted? Since Biden took office in January 2021, America has allowed some 5-6 million illegal entries across its southern border.

Obrador further congratulated the malleable Biden whom he sees as a kindred but complacent left-wing spirit:

“You are the first president of the United States in a very long time that has not built even one meter of wall.”

Translated that means Mexico is delighted the United States now cares little about the security of its border, the disappearance of which is wonderful news for Mexico.

Note that Mexico itself facilitates illegal transits across its southern border – as long as such Central American and other global migrants keep heading northward into the United States.

But when or if they pause, try to stay in Mexico, commit crimes, or expect Mexican social services, then almost immediately Mexico City sends thousands of troops to close its border with Guatemala, deports the illegal crossers, and revives talk of building a border wall of its own.

Biden has demolished America’s southern border. His illegal nullification of U.S. immigration law is music to Obrador’s ears.

But it is a nightmare to Americans who poll overwhelming disapproval of the subversion of their border security. They are exhausted by the influx of death-dealing drugs. And they are furious over the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from their strapped social services to attend to the needs of foreign nationals who have broken their laws.

Even overwhelmed blue sanctuary cities that once boasted of nullifying federal immigration law are now beginning to object to Biden’s complicity in Mexico’s manipulation of the border.

Obrador is delighted that Biden is the first White House occupant who in matters of the shared southern border grants all of Mexico’s wishes, but almost none of his citizens.

That reality raises the question that if Mexico were a declared enemy of the United States, how would it behave any differently than it is now?

Take drugs, for example. American overdoses due to fentanyl and other opioids are nearing 100,000 deaths per year.

Almost all such lethal opiates are manufactured in factories operated by drug cartels in Mexico that enjoy de facto immunity from prosecution. The Mexican opioid industry was designed solely for lucrative export to the United States – with zero concern over the death and destruction its products cause here.

Well aside from human trafficking and smuggling, cartel drugs indirectly earn the Mexican economy somewhere between $35-45 billion each year.

A hostile China profits by selling Mexicans the raw product. Beijing gains satisfaction that at the present death rate, more Americans will perish this decade alone from imported Mexican drugs than all the combat deaths in all the wars since America’s founding.

In that sense, Mexico is doing more damage to America than all our prior enemies combined.

Obrador is equally callous in bragging that he exports his own poor. Left unsaid is that a naturally rich Mexico either will not, or cannot, adequately employ, feed, shelter, and protect its impoverished citizens.

So instead, it cynically sees its people as a lucrative export commodity while holding U.S. laws in veritable contempt.

Currently, Mexican nationals are sending nearly $60 billion a year in remittances from the United States to Mexico to aid friends and families who do not find enough succor from their government in Mexico City. Untaxed remittances far and away constitute the largest source of Mexico’s foreign exchange income.

Much of that gifting is made possible by generous American state and federal subsidies to illegal aliens. Frequent subsidized housing, healthcare, legal assistance, education, and food in the United States are often used to free up cash for illegals, who then send it to Mexico.

Mexico sees this export of its people as a win-win-win-win proposition.

Illegal immigration to America exempts Mexico from covering the social welfare costs of its poorest.

In safety-valve fashion, it exports the volatility of social inequality rather than spending large sums to address it.

Mexico sees its huge and growing expatriate community as a valuable lobbying lever inside America, given the longer Mexican nationals are absent from Mexico, the more they romanticize the country they fled.

Finally, Mexico is a left-wing nation. The more it sends its poor to the United States, the more it feels Democratic politicians who grant concessions to Mexico will gain valuable new political constituents – ensuring still further concessions.

One sure sign of historic national decline is the collective inability of a government and its people to defend their borders and national sovereignty.

Mexico would happily agree.

Remember when rational voices asked why, instead of locking down its economy every time there was even a small breakout of the Wu-flu, China (or the US for that matter) didn’t simply do the right thing and allow covid to sweep through the land, creating a buffer of natural immunity and burn out on its own? Well, after bizarrely resisting the inevitable (one day we hope to have an answer why Xi Jinping pushed so hard for the now defunct Covid-zero policy) for so long, that’s precisely what China has now down and on Saturday, a prominent government scientist said that the possibility of a big COVID-19 rebound in China over the next two or three months is remote as 80% of people have now been infected, reaching the herd immunity threshold.

While the mass movement of people during the ongoing Lunar New Year holiday period may spread the pandemic, boosting infections in some areas, a second COVID wave is unlikely in the near term, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on the Weibo social media platform, according to Reuters.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese are traveling across the country for holiday reunions that had been suspended under recently eased COVID curbs, raising fears of fresh outbreaks in rural areas less equipped to manage large outbreaks.

To ease widespread if groundless fears which had been mercilessly stoked by Beijing for the past three years, a National Health Commission official also addressed the nation on Thursday saying that China has passed the peak of COVID patients in fever clinics, emergency rooms and with critical conditions.

According to “government data”, which in China means propaganda, nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospital as of Jan. 12, roughly a month after China abruptly dismantled its zero-COVID policy. But some experts said that figure probably vastly undercounts the full impact, as it excludes those who die at home, and because many doctors have said they are discouraged from citing COVID as a cause of death.

While over a billion Chinese having survived covid is good news, it’s terrible news for those pharma companies that held the world hostage for the past three years: after all, just how will Pfizer and Moderna be able to afford more yachts if they can’t sell their constantly changing, taxpayer-funded mRNA cocktail to the world’s (now 2nd) largest population. As for the world’s most populous country, India, it knew what was up more than a year ago when in Sept 2021 its government said it would not buy any shots from Pfizer and Moderna, thus depriving its population of countless complications from myocarditis and pericarditis.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Australians who tried to sell surgical face masks on the back of claims they worked against viruses were once threatened with prosecution and massive fines by the government.

Yes, really.

An article titled ‘Farce mask: it’s safe for only 20 minutes’ published by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003 explained how, “Retailers who cash in on community fears about SARS by exaggerating the health benefits of surgical masks could face fines of up to $110,000.”

The article quotes a public health experts who said that face masks are largely useless at stopping the spread of viruses and could even worsen the situation.

“Those masks are only effective so long as they are dry,” said Professor Yvonne Cossart of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney.

“As soon as they become saturated with the moisture in your breath they stop doing their job and pass on the droplets.”

Twenty years ago Australians were prosecuted for saying masks work against viruses. Now they get arrested for not wearing masks during viral outbreaks.

As Mencken said, our governments are dishonest, insane and intolerable. @smh https://t.co/wIGcvbW2OH https://t.co/XWVIEoNlpy pic.twitter.com/coaGDxa1SZ

— Tony Heller (@TonyClimate) January 23, 2023

Professor Cossart said that the masks would need to be changed every 15-20 minutes to be in any way effective.

Her sentiments were echoed by John Bell from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, who said that masks only offered “marginal benefit” and were largely psychological in their level of protection.

The story is noteworthy because during the COVID pandemic, the Australian government imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world and used face mask mandates as a brutal tool of population control.

As we previously highlighted, authorities in Melbourne used high-tech surveillance drones to catch people outside not wearing masks.

At the height of the hysteria, there were numerous instances of police in Australia physically attacking people for not adhering to mask wearing rules, including one incident when a woman was placed in a chokehold by a male police officer.

Another video showed an elderly woman being arrested for not wearing a mask while sitting on a park bench.

Yet another clip showed police pepper spraying pre-teen children for not wearing face masks.

Another clip showed an elderly man suffering a suspected heart attack after he was arrested by police for not wearing a mask outside while exercising.

During the early months of the COVID pandemic, health authorities advised against wearing masks, only to subsequently do a 180 once face coverings became a convenient psychological tool of population control.

*  *  *

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New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning his own Taiwan trip later this year, following former speaker Nancy Pelosi’s early August visit which had set off weeks of PLA military drills which encircled the self-ruled island, including repeat breaches of the Taiwan Strait median line. 

Fox News reported that the Pentagon is aware and busy making preparations. “The US military is drafting plans to ensure  safety on a trip to Taiwan later this year,” Fox reported.

Punchbowl News was the first to report the trip earlier in the day Monday, and said the US military is in the “early stages” of laying the logistical groundwork.

“McCarthy expressed support for Pelosi’s trip at the time and said he’d also travel to Taiwan if elected speaker,” Punchbowl wrote. “And just recently, McCarthy touted the House’s vote to establish a select committee on China, which received significant Democratic support.”

An official involved in the preparations indicated it’s expected to take place at some point in the spring. Pelosi’s visit had been teased for months as a possibility but was only made public when she was already en route and about to touch down in Taipei on August 2nd, accompanied by a delegation of five Democratic Party members. They flew out the next day after meeting with top officials including President Tsai Ing-wen.

China is already signaling severe opposition to another such ultra-provocative visit by a sitting US house speaker, an office third in line from the presidency after the vice president.

For example, state-run Global Times addressed earlier stirrings last week when rumors of McCarthy’s trip began to surface:

“If McCarthy does visit Taiwan in 2023,” a GT article began, “China-U.S. relations will witness another shock comparable to or even worse than that in August 2022 when Pelosi visited Taiwan.”

McCarthy, long an advocate of getting ‘tougher’ on China, hopes to lead the House-led GOP toward putting greater scrutiny on Beijing and making the US economic and military rival a top foreign policy priority.

Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times,

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley criticized the Supreme Court on Jan. 19 over its failure to determine who leaked a draft of the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion.

After a months-long investigation sparked by the May leak, the court released its much-anticipated investigative report (pdf) on the matter Thursday, finding that it was “not possible” to identify the person responsible for the breach or how the document had ended up in the hands of Politico.

“The Supreme Court’s report indicates that they cannot isolate the culprit among the over 80 possible suspects for the Dobbs leak,” Turley noted in a series of Jan. 19 tweets.

“It is an admission that is almost as chilling as the leak itself.”

The Supreme Court’s report indicates that they cannot isolate the culprit among the over 80 possible suspects for the Dobbs leak. It is an admission that is almost as chilling as the leak itself…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 19, 2023

Turley also posited that, despite the security recommendations of the court’s marshal, the inconclusive investigation would likely only serve to embolden future leakers.

“The nature of the Court’s work requires a free flow of drafts and memoranda,” he noted. “That is why we hope to achieve through deterrence what was not achieved through ethics.

“In this age of rage, this danger will only grow,” he added.

“Someone felt that they had license to leak. Some others may now feel that they have the impunity to do so.”

The Leak

While, in general, Supreme Court leaks are rare, the Dobbs leak was made all the more significant by the implications of the ruling on nearly a half-century of abortion law in the United States.

Politico, having exclusively obtained an early draft of the opinion, published it May 2 as part of a report titled, “Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.”

Although the draft differed slightly from the final opinion the court would issue on June 24, the decision was the same: The court ruled 5–4 that there is no constitutional right to abortion, striking down the precedents set by the 1973 landmark abortion case of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

The leaked draft sparked national protests, including outside the homes of conservative justices, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh becoming the target of an assassination attempt.

Calling the leak an “egregious breach” of the court’s trust, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered an investigation into its source.

“To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed,” Roberts assured in a May 3 statement.

“The work of the Court will not be affected in any way.”

The Investigation

Prior to Thursday’s report, the court had been tight-lipped on the progress of its investigation, with the only updates coming from anonymous sources.

Led by Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley, the court’s investigative team comprised “seasoned attorneys and trained federal investigators with substantial experience conducting criminal, administrative and cyber investigations,” per Curley’s report.

But after conducting 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, the team was unable to identify the individual responsible for the leak.

“No one confessed to publicly disclosing the document and none of the available forensic and other evidence provided a basis for identifying any individual as the source of the document,” Curley noted.

While the possibility of a hack could not be entirely ruled out, the team found that the evidence did not suggest improper outside access.

Investigators were likewise unable to rule out inadvertent or negligent disclosure, “for example, by being left in a public space either inside or outside the building.”

Additionally, despite reports that the justices were not interviewed as part of the investigation, Curley clarified in a statement Friday that she did speak with them in addition to their staff.

“During the course of the investigation, I spoke with each of the Justices, several on multiple occasions,” she said. “The Justices actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine. I followed up on all credible leads, none of which implicated the Justices or their spouses. On this basis, I did not believe that it was necessary to ask the Justices to sign sworn affidavits.”

While also noting in her report that investigators were still reviewing and processing some electronic data and that a few inquiries were pending, Curley proposed several security improvements to prevent future breaches, including enhanced training, tracking mechanisms to monitor the printing and copying of documents, and policy updates on the handling of draft opinions and who can access sensitive information.

In a statement attached to the report, the court offered Curley their “full support” as she and her team continue their investigation.

A group of 43 Democrats want to completely eliminate the debt ceiling, which they say Republicans have ‘weaponized’ – which would give the government a blank check to borrow without any limit from Congress.

The End the Threat of Default Act, introduced by Rep Bill Foster (D-IL) and co-sponsored by 42 House Democrats, comes after the federal government hit the $31,381 trillion debt ceiling last week. According to Democrats, instead of attempting to responsibly spend taxpayer dollars through negotiation, it’s time to just eliminate all limits on federal borrowing.

“Weaponizing the debt ceiling and using it as a pawn in partisan budget negotiations is dangerous and repeatedly brings our nation to the brink of default, which would be disastrous to the U.S. economy – something we’ve witnessed as recently as 2011 when Republicans created a debt ceiling crisis that resulted in the first ever downgrade to the U.S. credit rating,” said Foster.

“The government has an obligation to pay its bills,” he added. “Threatening to default on our debt is the same as ordering an expensive meal at a restaurant, eating it, and skipping out without paying. We can and should have a real conversation about overall spending, but the full faith and credit of the United States must never be compromised.”

If Democrats are so concerned about hitting the debt ceiling, they should start collecting student debt payments again.

— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) January 23, 2023

Co-sponsors of the bill include Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Barbara Lee of California, Fox News reports.

The Biden administration and its Democrat allies in Congress have argued that raising the debt ceiling does not allow “new” spending, and only allows the government to meet its current obligations. But Republicans say congressional approval of new spending programs is what has repeatedly forced the government to keep hitting its borrowing limit, which has then forced Congress to keep raising the debt ceiling.

Before the housing crisis in 2008, the total national debt was $9 trillion, an amount that more than tripled to more than $31 trillion in less than 15 years thanks to programs related to the housing bailout, 20 years of military presence in Afghanistan, COVID emergency response measures, and routine funding increases for defense and social programs. -Fox News

Just before the pandemic, the federal government spent $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2019. In 2020, that ballooned to $6.8 trillion, and then $6.3 trillion in FY2022.

Of course, Foster did not introduce the bill when Democrats had the majority in both chambers of Congress (and would have been shot down by their own Joe Manchin) – so let’s agree this yet another transparent attempt to signal virtue.