How 'bout them Cowboys? LOL. A "playoff" game of sorts; a win would have given them a division win, but not to be. Another Cowboys loss. And we move on.
Global warming: I assume as of January 1, 2020, we will have only eleven years left. Speaking of which, the Doomsday Clock says it is two minutes to midnight but as far as I know, we've never had a "global warming" clock. Oh, but I'm wrong, the "Doomsday Clock" now incorporates two existential threats: nuclear weapons and global warming. It never ends. By the way, at the linked site, most links there are back to CNN.
The Doomsday Clock says it’s almost the end of the world as we know it. (And that’s not fine.)
If you have anything left on your bucket list, do it now [I assume this is why the US House rushed the articles of impeachment], because the world is close to annihilation. That’s according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which gave its annual presentation of the Doomsday Clock on Thursday.
A group of scientists and scholars, including 15 Nobel laureates, set the clock at 11:58 p.m. — two minutes before the symbolic apocalyptic midnight.
Boeing safely landed
its crew capsule in the New Mexico desert Sunday after an aborted flight
to the International Space Station that could hold up the company’s
effort to launch astronauts for NASA next year.
The
Starliner descended into the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in the
frigid predawn darkness, ending a two-day demo that should have lasted
more than a week. A trio of red, white and blue parachutes popped open
and airbags also inflated around the spacecraft to ease the impact.
“We pinpoint landed it,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a post-landing briefing.
Pretty incredible:
Recovery teams
cheered as they watched the capsule drift down through the air and make a
bull’s-eye landing. The touchdown was broadcast live on NASA TV;
infrared cameras painted the descending capsule in a ghostly white.
As
the sun rose, close-up views showed the large white and black capsule
upright — with hardly any scorch marks from re-entry — next to a U.S.
flag waving from a recovery vehicle. The astronauts assigned to the
first Starliner crew — two from NASA and one from Boeing — were part of
the welcoming committee.
“A beautiful soft landing,” said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. “Can’t wait to try it out.”
It
was the first American-made capsule designed for astronauts to make a
ground landing after returning from orbit. NASA’s early crew capsules —
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo — all had splashdowns. SpaceX’s Dragon
capsule, which made its orbital debut last winter with a test dummy,
also aims for the ocean at mission’s end.
**************************
Reflections
From "Pride and Prejudice at Harvard," Mark Helprin, fall issue of Claremont Review of Books, pp. 55 - 61.
An alumnus of Harvard University reflects on his experience at Harvard as well as what Harvard currently "stands for."
Harvard has always taken up masses of real estate in Cambridge, Boston, and elsewhere, from forests, agricultural land in California, astronomical observatories around the world, to Bernard Berenson’s former villa in Florence, hospitals, clinics, a cyclotron, giant swimming pools, and secret gardens.
But mainly it straddles Cambridge like (if I can be permitted an insane simile) a fat, happy, beautiful, snobbish octopus.
You can do a lot with $40 billion, no taxes since 1633, and a river of government and private grants, tuition, and giant bequests. Harvard is as big and varied as Xanadu.
For example, only after almost a decade of living in the middle of it did I discover what appeared to be the terrace, of the faculty dining room, of the cafeteria, of the school of forestry.
Harvard contains Whitmanesque multitudes, and one can describe it only as accurately as the blind men describing an elephant.
[Channeling Henry James:] Though within its vastness I could be in only one place at a time—and spent most of that time with my head down, reading and writing—by chance alone I was present at so many disruptions in the late ’60s and early ’70s that by reasonable extrapolation their real number and frequency were a steady guerrilla warfare: the staple student protests about regulations and living conditions, which by then had been beautifully feathered into broader political themes; jackbooted, leather-clad Panthers marching in cadence through the Yard to the old Gund Hall, where they invaded a lecture on medieval city planning they claimed was in furtherance of black genocide, and forced the professor to abandon it; the attack by helmeted, chain-and-pipe-wielding leftist fascisti on what they thought was the Center for International Affairs but was really the Semitic Museum and its aging female docents (it might have been funny except for the injuries and destruction); Cambridge cited in the Institute for Strategic Studies’s (which later prefixed International to itself) Strategic Survey, 1970, for a violent demonstration (among many) in which, inter alia, on April 16 of that year 300 were injured; trying to sleep despite clouds of tear gas wafting from Harvard Square a third of a mile away; my graduate adviser’s car bombed in the garage adjacent to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where he was the director; literally fighting my way past thugs blocking classroom buildings; and so on.
Even in its stronger days, the administration either surrendered, compromised, or did not notice.
I never attended Harvard University but I am one kiss / one handshake away from being an honorary alumnus (in my own mind, LOL) through two other alumnae: a) my first true love, in another life; and, b) a son-in-law, current life.
Good, bad, indifferent, there is no question that Harvard University is an American icon, and I find it incredibly intriguing.
Everyone is concerned that the current US expansion, the longest in US history, simply cannot last any longer. Expansionary cycles simply don't last this long.
I've talked about this just the other day.
One wonders if the current expansion actually began in late 2016; if so, this expansion could be just beginning. Maybe the current expansion can be measured from sometime in 2016. It's subtle, but ....
Some might argue the boom is just beginning, especially if one sees the graphic below in the graph above:
Tailwinds:
cheap money -- really cheap money
Fed cuts rates again -- and telegraphs unequivocally there will be no increase in rates through 2020
Fed injects billions of dollars into the banking system to keep things going
no government shut down -- $1.4 trillion "budget" to avert government shutdown
DOD -- budget increased -- will drive lots of jobs
new Space Force -- new growth engine for DOD?
current pro-business attitude in Washington
lots of overseas jobs moving back to the US
the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is still only two years old; benefits continue to work through the economy; those pro-business tax cuts in 2018 and 2019 will continue into 2020
current administration looking for new/more tax cuts
in election year, neither party likely to push back on new tax cuts
low unemployment: more money circulating through economy
FICO credit card score said to be highest in eleven years in some studies; one link here;
discretionary income could increase in 2020
both parties looking to relieve student aid debt
Americans could spend smallest amount, as a percentage of their income, on gasoline in modern history in 2020
punitive ObamaCare taxes being eliminated
huge amount of IRA money could be "freed up" in 2020
avoided
global warming taxes and economy-killing policies
tectonic trade shifts
USMCA passed
China-US trade, phase 1 passed
Headwinds:
Boeing [Five minutes after posting this, I see that the Boeing Spaceliner nailed it; perfect landing; maybe Boeing can be removed as a headwind.]
Note: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy.
Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, career, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.
from Exxon Mobil's Shute Creek Gas Plant and COP's Lost Cabin Gas Plant in Wyoming
via several pipelines to Fallon County in southeastern Montana
from Fallon County through North Dakota through pipeline currently under consideration
through Stark and Bowman counties
Denbury Resources -- EOR project
one other CO2 pipeline exists in the state
authorized by the PSC in 1998
CO2 from Basin Electric's Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah to oil fields in Saskatchewan, Canada
if approved, pipeline would be built in 2020; ready for injection in early 2021
Cedar Creek Anticline Area: straddles North Dakota - Montana state line
"secondary recovery" -- waterflooding
"tertiary recovery" -- CO2
Also in the story:
The state Industrial Commission, which also regulates the oil
industry, authorized a project in November that targets Bakken wells in
Mountrail County. Hess is leading that effort, which involves injecting
natural gas and a proprietary foam underground to build pressure and
extract more oil.
One other enhanced
oil recovery project secured approval from the Industrial Commission on
Tuesday. XTO is proposing to inject natural gas into both the Bakken and
Three Forks formations in Dunn County to boost oil production.
