More Idle Ramblings On A Beautiful Saturday Morning

I haven't visited a McDonald's restaurant since my last road trip, but I was in the mood for a Big Mac while doing some blogging. Knowing that McDonald's never has an electric outlet, I just brought in the computer without the charger.

Lo and behold: two outlets at a window seat. And the outlet works. I know, because I went outside and got the charger for the computer.

It's one of the bigger, more brightly lit McDonald's I've visited in quite some time. The manager or assistant manager or person in charge or whatever was a middle-aged Hispanic woman. As friendly as they get. My hunch is she is singularly responsible for keeping the outlets. I'll be back.

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I don't know if folks have really thought about this story yet, or if it has sunk in: the oil and gas industry in North Dakota is now reported to have surpassed the agriculture industry in terms of economic value. Did you all read that story? Did you see what I saw? Of course, it's a record (the oil and gas figures) but it's more than just a record. In economic terms, the oil and gas industry is walloping agriculture in North Dakota:

It’s also more than double what was the record value of the state’s crops and livestock grown and raised in 2012, based on prices received by farmers.

This is what surprises me. For the past two or three years I have not seen one story in which a legislator actually suggested the oil and gas industry might surpass agriculture in North Dakota. It has never been a headline. It was not a headline when the two industries were neck and neck, or when oil and gas went ahead by $1. It was not a headline until the numbers were so stunning even the publisher, The Dickinson Press, couldn't miss it. Twice the agricultural value. Wow. Twice. North Dakota is producing $2 billion worth of oil and gas every month. This production is occurring, for the most part, in four counties: Dunn, McKenzie, Mountrail, and Williams. Looking at the permits, one could argue that it's coming down to two counties, McKenzie and Williams.

The gap should continue to widen. Agriculture will remain in a "range," which appears to be about $12 billion annually based on the linked article. So, there it is: a data point with which to compare the oil and gas industry in North Dakota.

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Ennio Morricone

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I will continue to post articles on ObamaCare, but it's pretty clear to me how this will all play out, and how it has already played out. Without a doubt, there has been nothing so disrupting to the culture of America as ObamaCare since the depression. And it was absolutely preventable. It is not often a politician in the same party as the president calls something a "trainwreck" that will be that president's legacy. "Not often"? Probably never.

My only frustration: folks still see this as a GOP-DEM-TeaParty-Progressive issue. Seventy, eighty, ninety percent of Americans, depending how you ask the question are now opposed to ObamaCare. The unions are opposed to ObamaCare. The Democratic writer of the bill calls it a "trainwreck."

But if one wants to make it political, I think the TeaParty is handling the issue exactly right. Even if the TeaParty did nothing else at this point, they have accomplished all they needed to. They kept the issue on the front burner; now Americans across the board can decide where to go from here. Had the TeaParty (and I use that term in a general sense) let the issue die, Americans would not have had a chance for a do-over. My position on ObamaCare is the same as my position on slicers and dicers. I did what I could to alert folks to the debacle. It's a democratic country and if folks want slicers and dicers, that's their call. The same for ObamaCare.

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I will also continue to post articles on "global warming." It is now absolutely clear that "global warming" was a scam from the beginning. The UN report will bear that out.

Oh, by the way. That reminds me. I was surprised Scientific American, did not edit a comment out of their special issue on quantum physics. [The following is very, very esoteric. I don't expect the editor or the publisher, The Dickinson Press, to read it, and if one or the other does, expect them to understand the implications of the concluding paragraph.]

The Special Collector's Edition, Scientific American,"Extreme Physics: Probing The Mysteries of the Cosmos" has a display date until August 12, 2013.
The articles in this special edition included:

• Portrait of a black hole
• Black stars, not holes
• A Quantum threat of special relativity
• Beyond the quantum horizon

as well as a great graphic of the Standard Model, something all high school students today should know, just as high school students of my generation all "knew" the periodic table.

The last article was an interview with Leonard Susskind, a Stanford University physicist, who forty years ago co-founded string theory that transformed the status quo in physics; the theory has become the leading candidate for the unified theory of nature.

The interview ended with his thoughts on multiple universes and the philosophy of physics.

This paragraph was totally unexpected:

The universe is very, very big. Empirically we know it's at least 1,000 times bigger in volume that the portion that we can ever see. The success of the concept of cosmic inflation opens the possibility that the universe is varied on big enough scales. String theory provides Tinkertoy elements that can be put together in an enormous number of ways. So there's no point in looking for explanations of why our piece of the world is exactly the way it is because there are other pieces of the world that are not exactly the same as ours. 

There can't be a universal explanation of everything that it is, any more than there can be a theorem that says the average temperature of a planet is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Anyone who tried to make a calculation to prove that planets have a temperature of 60 degrees would be foolish because there are lots of planets out there that don't have that temperature.

Wow, this is coming from one of America's pre-eminent physicists, based in California, center of the universe for fruits and nuts. It's possible there are multiple interpretations to his "60-degrees Fahrenheit-global-temperature" comment, but it is clear to me what he is saying.

Who would have thought that in less than four years, the global warming folks would be seen as inaugural members of the "new flat earth society"?

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I hate to belabor the issue, but do you all remember the predictions of all that increased solar activity we were supposed to be experiencing this year? An update:

LONDON: Predictions that 2013 would see an upsurge in  solar activity and geomagnetic storms disrupting power grids and communications systems have proved to be a false alarm. Instead, the current peak in the solar cycle is the weakest for a century.

Subdued solar activity has prompted controversial comparisons with the Maunder Minimum, which occurred between 1645 and 1715, when a prolonged absence of sunspots and other indicators of solar activity coincided with the coldest period in the last millennium.

This is very, very interesting. Next thing we know, the next president will be begging us to burn more coal. China and India will be at the forefront of solving the global cooling problem. Of course, there won't be any relationship between fossil fuels and global temperatures, but that won't stop Hillary. I don't think she ever bought into Algore's theorem anyway.