Nothing About The Bakken -- Flying Safe -- Clearing Out The in-Box -- Sunday, March 24, 2019, T+81

This will be a great week to track a lot of other blogs, particularly:

• Powerline, perhaps my favorite "political" blog;
• Deplorable Climate Blog; my favorite for any number of reasons, particularly the nature photography;
• Carpe Diem, Mark Perry, an example; 
• Zero Hedge, only because it's banned by Facebook; banned by the latter, you know it has to be honest and interesting;

Hubris, and persona non grata: 78 days as a freshman socialist Congresswoman and already asking for an increase in pay. 

Link here.

She's a pauper in Washington, DC. She's finding out how expensive it is to have a nice apartment in a gated (walled/fenced) community in DC. On top of that, the furniture and the furnishings, and the entertaining -- very expensive. She is also under investigation for mixing campaign money with personal income -- now that she can't do that any more it will be harder for her to make ends meet. In addition, fashionable clothes -- needed for all those television appearances -- not inexpensive. Another Maduro socialist. The good news: even if members of Congress vote themselves a 20% pay increase, it won't be enough for Occasional-Cortex.

Perhaps That Global Warming $100 Billion Could Have Been Better Earmaked For Central US:

A key "plank" in the UN global warming scheme was to transfer $100 billion from "the west" to the Maldives, one of the island nations that cleverly argued that it would sink below the ocean (in fact, since those original claims/predictions, in fact, the Maldives footprint has actually increased -- but I digress). Back to the original thought: a key "plank" in the UN global warming scheme was to transfer $100 billion from "the west" to the Maldives to assist its fight against "flooding.

Perhaps, it would have been better to spend that $100 billion on protecting infrastructure in the US midwest (Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri) from this year's (2019) flooding. It's not as if we did not know this would happen. It was estimated that one million calves drowned. This did not make the "network" evening news as far as I know.

Or, I suppose, we could use that $100 billion to short up the US Atlantic seaboard and/or the US Gulf -- most of us know that we will see devastating US coastal hurricanes this year or next or the year after that ...

A reader recently posted that he had difficulty watching one of the videos I recently posted. I have the same feelings about the video below, not sure if I really want to post it. It is incredibly creepy, and interestingly, except for a video that went viral, no one seemed too upset. As far as I know it never made "network" evening news. 

#MeToo:


Global warming: what I find most amazing is that in the 4.5 billion years of earth's existence and at 200,000 years of Homo sapiens on earth, right now, at this very moment, I was alive to see how the earth will end -- we have just twelve eleven years to act. What are the odds, that after 4.5 billions, or 200,000 years, it would be our generation that was responsible for the end of the world?

Stuff that didn't happen:

• 1989, UN official as reported by the AP: "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
• 1967, best-selling book, mass starvation by 1975
• 1975, UC-Davis professor Kenneth Watt warned that global freezing would be as dangerous as nuclear war; that the world would be eleven degrees colder in the year 2000
• 2006, Algore said humanity had only ten years left before the world would reach a point of no return; shortly thereafter, Algore bought an $8-million beach-front property near Los Angeles
• 1982, UN executive director of the UN Environment Program, "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear threat
• 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson, often considered the "father of Earth Day" -- warned that "in 25 years, somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct"
• date not reported, scientist Harrison Brown in Scientific American predicted that metals (zinc, tin, gold, and silver deposits) would be depleted
• Hubbert's peak oil  
• ice-free Arctic by 2014

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Putting Things Into Perspective

From The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, c. 1986. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This is an incredibly fascinating history to read in light of the fact ("the science is settled") that the earth will no longer be habitable by humans in less than twelve years unless "we act now."

Apparently the the 12-year clock was re-set in/about January, 2019.

From The Making Of The Atomic Bomb.

It is 1941. Four countries, maybe five, are involved with "making the atomic bomb" at least on some level: Germany, Russia, Japan, and the US. And maybe France.

The Brits are, far and away, the farthest along. The Americans are led by stodgy bureaucrats who even refuse to share information with the FDR. Germany is confused: early on it took the wrong fork in the road. But that did not mean Germany would not eventually figure it out. The Japanese were probably only involved with the theory and not actively engaged, mostly because they did not have access to the raw materials needed.

In 1941, it was a British researcher that finally moved UC-Berkeley's Ernest Lawrence to action, and finally the "issue" arrived in the office of FDR. From pp. 378 - 379, the key points.

Policy was the President's prerogative. As soon as [they] exposed [the feasibility of an atomic bomb] to view, Roosevelt seized it. [The team leader] took [FDR's] decision to be the most important outcome of the meeting and put it emphatically first in his memorandum to [the rest of the team].

Roosevelt wanted policy consideration restricted to a small group (it came to be called the Top Policy Group). He named the members Vice President Wallace, Secretary of war Henry L. Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and [two members of the nuclear research agency].

Every man owed his authority to the President.

Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself.

Thus at the outset of the US atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build ...

A scientist could choose to help or not to help build nuclear weapons. That was his (sic) only choice. The surrender of any further authority in the manner was the price of admissions to what would grow to be a separate, secret state with separate sovereignty linked to the public state through the person and by the sole authority of the President.

There are indications [in memorandum written at the time] that Roosevelt was concerned less with a Germany challenge than with the long-term consequences of acquiring so decisive a new class of destructive instruments.

Roosevelt was thinking beyond developing bombs for the war that the United States had not yet entered. He was thinking about a military development that would change the political organization of the world.

The United States was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb. But it was committed to exploring thoroughly whether or not an atomic bomb could be built. One man, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment -- secretly, without consulting Congress or courts.

It seems to be a military decision and he was Commander in Chief.