by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Just wondering, you know.

Colonial’s pipeline is allegedly being restarted.  That’s nice.  Who’s asking why that company is still in business and why we have one firm, with no regulation or oversight, that is responsible for basically the entire fuel supply in the Northeast part of the nation!

Excuse me?

Oh, it’s just gas.  Really?

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

You do realize that without fuel nothing moves.  Not airplanes, not trucks, and not cars.  Would you like some groceries?  That’s nice; how do you think they get to the store?  Walmart, for some clothes, or whatever?  Same.  Air freight of all sorts?  How do you do that when there’s no fuel to fill the plane or truck back up after it brings your stuff — or people?

Oh, that’s an inconvenience.  Is that so?

Why is your water from the tap safe to drink?  You do realize that the chlorine dioxide (most-often used) or just chlorine itself (somewhat less-often) must be delivered by truck to your local water department, right?  What do you think happens if it runs out?

Same on the other side; flocculants and similar are used on the sewer side.  No capacity to process sewage?  That’s a bummer.

Electricity?  I like my wall switch.  When I push it the lights come on.  You like that too, I suspect.  What if there are no trucks to bring the chemicals used to balance the water in the boilers — oh, you didn’t know they needed that — or the parts to repair something that has broken?

Biden and others assure us we’ll have “green energy.”  How’s that working out about right now?  Exactly how do you intend to replace the diesel truck or aircraft — and with what do you think you will power them?

Where do those solar panels come from you dream of?  Slave labor in China; literal slave labor.  We haven’t known about that for years, have we?  Oh wait – we have; many, many companies that are all listed on our stock exchange and, I remind you, have had very nice price increases.  Gee, the cheapest labor is priced at zero, is it not?

Why else make them in China?  Well maybe because producing them is (1) energy intensive and (2) involves all sorts of nasty process chemicals which, in the US, you must properly neutralize, recycle or dispose of.  In China?  Blow it out the smokestack or dump it in the river.

Then we have the I-40 bridge at Memphis.  An obvious steel structural fracture.  Notice all the corrosion in the pictures near there?  Was it investigated….. and when?  This doesn’t look like a break that happened a couple of days ago.  What has the overload (transfer of load) to other structural members done to the rest of the bridge?  What was its original design life and load rating?  Have either been exceeded without proper engineering support?  How do you think they intend to fix this, given that all the other structural members that took the load have now likely been overstressed?  How will they be able to determine if they have, and if they have (they probably have), now what?  Are there any actual engineers in the nation left or were they all diversity-promoted in college and hired on the same basis?  Fortunately there is another bridge in the general area not far away.  Unfortunately using only one of the two means traffic is going to be, well…. nasty.

They’re freaked out enough about this bridge and that break to stop all river traffic too, you know.  That means it’s not just the vehicles on the bridge that pose a problem — they’re concerned it may not support its own weight and could collapse without warning into the river.

The river in question isn’t very important, is it?  It doesn’t carry a hell of a lot of barge traffic with a bunch of “stuff” that we all would like to have available to us, does it?  There’s a nice convenient way around what is now an effective blockade of said traffic, right?  Oh wait — there isn’t?

How long will that take to resolve?  Does anyone have even a poor guess?  I don’t.

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