Want a break from the venality of Don Jr and siblings? Had enough of hearing about Hunter Biden? Let’s take the Wayback Machine to the seventies — the nineteen seventies.
William Carter, better known as “Billy,” ran for mayor of Plains Georgia in 1976. He lost by a narrow margin. That same year, his older brother James, better known as “Jimmy,” was elected president of the United States.
After attending Emory University in Atlanta for a while and four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, Billy came beck home to Plains and joined brother Jimmy in the family’s peanut business. In 1972 he purchased a gasoline service station in Plains. When Jimmy began his run for president, Billy began to attract notice from the news media.
Wooden It Be Nice
Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is more than four hundred parts per million, a concentration greater than at any time in the last three and a half million years. Back then, mid-Pliocene, there was little ice at the earth’s poles and sea level was sixty feet higher.
Those who do not accept that humankind has passed the environmental tipping point place great hope in carbon capture and sequestration. CCS, in simple terms, means capturing CO2 and burying it deep underground where it cannot escape for many millennia. (Kinda like all the methane gas below rapidly-melting tundra.) Carbon-dioxide removal doesn’t just slow or stop the increase of CO2, it reduces it. Skeptics warn that forcing carbon underground will increase earthquake activity. (See fracking.)
The Short Life, Death and Rebirth of Surfridge
When your plane takes off from LAX — Los Angeles International Airport — you swing out over the Pacific Ocean before banking into the general direction of your destination. Depending on your flight and on weather conditions, you may get a good view of breaking surf, downtown L.A. and 
Dodger Stadium. Between the end of the runway and the surf, you may notice remnants of abandoned streets. That used to be the prosperous town of Palisades del Rey, better known as Surfridge.
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Aliens Killing Our Cattle?
Ranchers in eastern Oregon have been unsettled by what they lately have been discovering on remote areas of their land. Over the summer five carcasses of young purebred bulls have been found north of the town of Burns. The bulls were bloodless, their tongues and genitals surgically removed. There was no sign of coyotes or buzzards or any other scavengers. The ground around the desiccated bodies was undisturbed, no boot prints, no paw or hoof prints, no vehicle tracks..
Flying Drones for Dinner?
“I keep getting trouble with my wife — when we go shopping in the delicatessen, I’m the one that’s flexing the salamis to see what their tensile strength is because they’d make good wing spars!”
Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) — aka drones — are part of the twenty-first century world. We mostly think of them as a means to drop bombs on people or a the newest way to invade our privacy. Nigel Gifford has a better idea: use drones to deliver food to besieged people.
Continue reading “Flying Drones for Dinner?”Our Trust-Busting Justice Department
Republicans emphatically oppose an overreaching Federal Government interfering with business. Except when they don’t. Republicans are strongly in favor of the rights of states to handle their own internal affairs. Except when they aren’t.
As part of the current occupant of the White House’s War on Anything Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded regulations mandating increased automobile fuel economy. The regs, issued in 2011, required automobile manufacturers to produce average fuel economy of 50 miles per gallon by the year 2025. The present-day EPA stated that fewer emissions was a noble goal but it would make cars more expensive and somehow less safe and so isn’t worth it
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