Huge Success Story In Crosby, ND

The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:

Anyone who remembers Bushel 42 in Crosby remembers the heartbreak of money lost trying to stem the flow of people leaving North Dakota.

A multimillion-dollar pasta plant enterprise, Bushel 42 was to be a checkpoint at the border. It would keep people home working good jobs and revitalize a region lush in resources and increasingly poor in people in the twilight years of the ’90s.

The plant failed, hopes dimmed, money was lost and the lights went out. Two years ago, the empty facility was purchased in a merged venture of two regional elevators, and today it’s one of the region’s largest employers.

In a twist of Bakken-inspired fate, New Century Ag is a bustling business, in large part because the outmigration of two decades ago has been transformed into an in-migration of thousands of oil field workers who stop for fuel, food and showers at this mixed truck stop and farm store.

For the complete story, go to the linked article. Another wonderful success story. 

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A Note To The Granddaughters

It is an incredibly beautiful day in the Boston area, after a couple of dreary, drizzly, damp, disgusting days. The weather started to change last night. I took advantage of that. I rode into Cambridge, finding a more direct bicycle route, making for a much more enjoyable ride.

I perused some great books down at the Harvard Book Store. I found several that I would have bought in the past, but things are changing, and I didn't get anything last night. I paged through a number of books on quantum mechanics to compare with the Louisa Gilder book I'm reading now (for the second time, and outlining). In her book, Ms Gilder wrote quite a bit on Paul Ehrenfest, one of Einstein's closest friends. I was curious to see what others had written about Ehrenfest. The most promising book on quantum mechanics had three single references to Ehrenfest, each about a sentence long, and each of the three references were only a passing comment. From that book, I would not have learned anything about Ehrenfest; from Louisa gilder I felt I knew him as much as I could know anyone from that era, that discipline.

While standing in line at Starbucks, I read the following passage, describing the early 1930's when Hitler had just come to power in Germany:

Hesienberg wrote to Bohr a month later from Zurich, where the mail was not owned by the Nazis, "Concerning the Nobel Prize, I have had a bad conscience regarding ...."

Wow. "....where the mail was not owned by the Nazis...."

And the story that broke last week here on the east coast in the US, in the 21st century:

• the USPS photographs the front and back of every piece of mail going through its facilities
• the NSA tracks every e-mail sent by Americans
• Schumer, Pelosi, Reid, Markey knew all along that the NSA was tracking all American phone calls

For me, it just seems so unreal. Under Richard Nixon I could have expected these revelations but under a liberal, progressive ... who wudda thought? I do think that moving from a community organizer to president of the United States, literally overnight, the president was a) in over his head; b) never imagined the power;  and, c) taken over by others and taken over by events, it was natural that the aphorism would be proved true: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We've all learned that what is printed in the media is but the tip of the iceberg of all that is really going on. Anyone who believes that the government is only tracking phone numbers and not listening in on conversations or reading e-mail is ... naive. Very naive.

Where is Hunter S. Thompson when we need him? At best we're getting bland reporting from reporters with no sense of rage. I wonder if The Rolling Stone Magazine will do an in-depth report of the revelations this past week? If the magazine ignores this story this month, I would not be surprised. Or what Vanity Fair will report? Both of these publications devoted a lot of space to abuse of power under Reagan and Bush, but anything those two did, pales in comparison to what is being revealed this week.

Back to 1933:

Hesienberg wrote to Bohr a month later from Zurich, where the mail was not owned by the Nazis, "Concerning the Nobel Prize, I have had a bad conscience regarding ...." -- p. 149, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, Louisa Gilder, c. 2008.

At least one late-night comedian is talking about it; the others are avoiding the subject. Based on the front page of today's New York Times, the story is a non-issue. Their front-page story on the subject is crowded out by other mundane stories, and the story on snooping has a headline suggesting a "feel-good" analysis of how the US uses technology to mine data.