RUTHFULLY YOURS

America has been facing a helium crisis that goes far beyond balloons and threatens our medical care and military readiness. Thankfully, a new helium reservoir has just been discovered, but the ongoing helium shortage won’t instantly go away and, combined with the Biden administration’s many anti-military policies, still leaves us vulnerable to a military strike by a foreign actor.

On Friday, news broke about the helium reservoir, along with the fact that (a) our national security depends on helium, (b) we’re dangerously low on that essential gas, and (c) a current reserve sell-out will reduce helium capacity going forward:

A potential helium reservoir was discovered in Minnesota last week after drillers bored deep beneath the forest floor of the state’s Iron Range as supplies of the noble gas dwindle in the U.S.

Pulsar Helium Inc., a Canadian-based company, announced in a news release on Thursday that its team encountered gases with concentrations of up to 12.4% helium when its drilling rig reached a total depth of 2,200 at the Topaz Project drill site. Helium concentrations above 0.3% are considered economically viable.

[snip]

Helium’s unique qualities make the gas an important and desired resource.

While known as a lightweight gas that can fill balloons and blimps, helium can also take a liquid form that acts as a coolant for superconducting magnets needed to operate MRI machines and in the manufacturing of semiconductors. The gas also has applications in the defense industry, from rocket engine testing to air-to-air missile guidance systems and more.

In January, the Compressed Gas Association warned in a letter that the U.S. government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve system (FHR) “could lead to severe disruptions in the U.S. helium supply chain.”

If you’re wondering what the “government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve” means, the answer is that the U.S. just sold off part of its stockpile.

On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.

Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.

[snip]

The sale of the government’s stockpile of the nonrenewable element could exacerbate an existing supply shortage, Saha said.

Biden cannot be blamed for the sale. In 2013, there was already a helium shortage, and Congress hoped the private market might do better. It hasn’t.

Now, after 11 years, the Biden administration is finally selling the reserve. The problem is that the shortages that will arrive with this sell-off (which cannot instantly be offset by the Minnesota reservoir) will join the Biden administration’s myriad deliberate actions affecting military readiness. (Note: I’ve been told that I was a bit confusing here. Let me rephrase it: I was trying to say that the sell-off wasn’t Biden’s policy. He’s just doing what Congress instructed. Nevertheless, it seems that he did it in a bad way at a bad time.)

This sell-off gets added to the Biden administration’s decision to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in 2022, just in time for the midterms, to help offset the disastrous economic consequences of Biden’s drilling bans. As William Duncan explained, it takes decades to replenish what Biden sold. So far as I know, Biden hasn’t even attempted to refill the SPR now that he’s drained it.

Our modern military cannot function without petroleum resources. It is completely dependent on them for everything from food and uniforms to housing to transportation to communication to all weaponry.

But wait! There’s more.

Speaking of weaponry, who can forget the way the Biden administration has been giving our weapons away to Ukraine? Maybe it seemed like a good idea to clean out old supplies and make room for new ones, but the Pentagon is running out of money to replace what’s been given away.

Moreover, even if it were handed billions today (which I’m sure the weapons manufacturers are urging Congress to do), we face the same problem we do with the SPR: You cannot replenish massive stockpiles overnight. We’ll be at a deficit for quite a while.

Lastly, there’s Biden’s attack on our military’s human capital. Currently, the military is facing a dangerous recruiting crisis—and it’s driven by the fact that whites, especially white men, no longer want to join the military. This isn’t because this cohort is less patriotic than before. It’s because the military has become a hostile environment for them.

White men might be able to overlook accelerating transgender madness (although I doubt any women enjoy having a mentally ill man ogling them in the showers), but the open racism is intolerable. How open? Well, the mandatory training military members receive tells them that America is inherently racist and always has been:

This kind of racist garbage tells whites they’re not welcome in the military because they are the living emblems of evil while telling minorities that the country they swore to defend isn’t worth defending. I can’t repeat often enough that this kind of training creates officers and troops who will think twice about firing on a foreign enemy but will instantly turn on the American people—especially the allegedly hate-filled, racist, paranoid, violent whites in America’s heartland.

Taken alone, each of Biden’s policies, whether vis-à-vis helium, petroleum, weapons, or transgenderism and racism in the military, is bad. Taken together, they leave America completely dead in the water should an external enemy launch a military attack against us.