Locator: 48550B.
WTI: $68.28.
Active rigs: 31.
Two new permits, #41725 - #41726:
No cancelled permits.
No DUCs reported as completed.
Locator: 48549SIR.
Quick: tell me -- of the three, four, or five previous industrial revolutions, which has been bigger?
Today: link here. $1.4 trillion from .... one ... country.
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The Book Page
The current issue of The New York Review, March 27, 2025, has an excellent 2.25 page review / essay of Operation Warp Speed, the development of a Covid-19 vaccine. The book reviewed: The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets, Thomas R. Cech, c. 2025, Norton, 292 pages.
I won't bother to read the book; there doesn't appear to be anything new that isn't already known by those following the story. Interestingly, I'm not even sure for whom the book was written.
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A Second Book Page
Wow, wow, wow -- if one wants to go down a rabbit hole that will occupy oneself for the entire weekend, if not a month of Sundays, one can hardly do better than read Michael Dirda's essay on Ford Maddox Ford, and the introduction of FMF's novel, The Good Soldier. Along the way one will be re-introduced to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. One will end up drawing out the genealogy of Ford Brown - Caroline Madox family tree and its intersection with the much wilder Rossetti family tree, which of course, extends to John William Polidori, the close friend of Lord Byron. In 1908, at the age of 35, FMF 1908,
... founded the best literary magazine at the time, The English Review, but was editor for just one year.
Ford published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats; and debuted works of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas.
Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets in London in the teens particularly valued Ford's poetry as exemplifying treatment of modern subjects in contemporary diction.
In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Ford befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford was the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
George Seldes, in his book Witness to a Century, describes Ford ("probably in 1932") recalling his writing collaboration with Joseph Conrad, and the lack of acknowledgment by publishers of his status as co-author. Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: "'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes." Ford says, "I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway." Seldes observes, "At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry."
Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s. He describes Ford "as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."
As noted, going down this rabbit hole is going to keep me occupied for a month of Sundays. Certainly until Easter.
I may start with The Good Soldier.
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Remember the P-47 Thunderbolt?
And the 47th President?
Locator: 48548MEASLES.
Seasonal flu is so over. Link here.
And this is why we have a democracy: measles.
NYT on measles. Excellent story.
Locator: 48547ARCHIVES.
The statistics are daunting ... but the article is fascinating.
Sorting out the likely authors of The Federalist Papers.
When the resulting percentage is high for a given attribution, we have a set of corroborating evidence in favor of one author (without having an definitive and absolute certainty). In this perspective, this study confirms Madison as the real author of Federalist Paper #49, #50, #51, #52, #53, #54, #62, and #63.
Locator: 48545PARACHUTES.
I don’t know if you saw the splashdown when the astronauts were brought back to earth but the parachutes were incredibly beautiful — truly modern art — others have noticed. Look at this: those parachutes were DESIGNED AT STANFORD!!
From the #1 presidential speechwriter, now writing for The WSJ:
The SpaceX return of astronauts after nine months at the International Space Station was both a humanitarian achievement and a technological marvel. It was also a design marvel.
The capsule, the uniforms—and here I must have a happiness freak-out about the parachutes that eased the capsule down.
They were gorgeous as physical objects and beautifully designed, like high art, like a Christo installation, with their red and white and deep-hued, elegant markings to enhance visibility.
At certain points before and during splashdown they moved like huge jellyfish in the sea. They were made with new stitching method and with a specialized polymer called Zylon, developed by researchers at Stanford.
Locator: 48544B.
Director's Cut. January, 2025, data.
Crude oil: down 1.7% from January to February, 2025.
DUCs:
GDPNow, link here. - 1.8.
California: PSX will close its San Pedro (Lost Angeles) refinery later this year. Link here.
Headlines:
The oil-and-gas industry is landing blow after blow against climate activists.
The Trump administration has cranked out approvals of major projects to ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast and killed a host of climate-related initiatives. Meanwhile, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren has won a nearly $700 million verdict against Greenpeace that could spell the end of the group’s U.S. presence.
These are major setbacks for green groups. They have opposed new exports of U.S. natural gas, sought to stop new pipelines and asked the government to step up support of communities affected by climate change. The defeats herald the challenges that activists face as President Trump and his allies move to expand fossil fuels’ footprint here and abroad.
