Dodged a Bullet

Two years ago the month of August had half a dozen tropical storms, culminating with Hurricane Laura, the first of two hurricanes to drag its way over my house.

Aside from the damage, the extended power outages, the evacuation and living outside the area for weeks, then powering an apartment with a portable generator, TWO hurricanes is a bit much.

I noted the glee with which the global warming alarmists pointed out that this was A Sign of Things to Come® and we should get used to it.

Two years later we’ve made it through the entire month without a single named storm, much less a hurricane, ANYWHERE.

This is called ‘weather’.

Today in History – 31 August

1422 – King Henry V of England dies of dysentery while in France. His son, Henry VI becomes King of England at the age of 9 months. At least the kid’s got the genes for it, unlike our previous ‘leader’, the progeny of a Kenyan layabout and a white pron-star wanna-be.

1535 – Pope Paul II deposed & excommunicated King Henry VIII over a question of annulment and divorce. Henry says “Feh! You want to run a church, run THAT church. I’m starting my own.” And the Church of England comes into being. Another memorable moment in history precipitated by the ongoing pursuit of the Great Bearded Clam.

1803 – Lewis and Clark start their expedition from Pittsburgh at 11 o clock in the morning. In 1803, Pittsburgh was pretty much the end of civilization. Many politicians in Washington still believe that today.

1886 – The 7.0 Mw Charleston earthquake affects southeastern South Carolina with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme); 60 people killed with damage estimated at $5–6 million. People tend to forget that the West Coast isn’t the only part of the country subject to earthquakes.

1895
 – German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his Navigable Balloon.

1914
 – German General von Kluck decides not to attack Paris. Denies Paris a chance to meet future clientele, goes down in history as the German general who DIDN’T go to Paris. Parisian restaurateurs have to destroy all the menus they’d had printed up in German. Parisian brothel stocks plunge.

1920 – The first radio news program is broadcast by 8MK in Detroit, accused Donald trump of meeting with Vladimir Lenin.

1939 – Nazi Germany mounts a staged attack on Gleiwitz radio station, giving them an excuse to attack Poland the following day, starting World War II in Europe. Never let a crisis go to waste, and if you don’t have a convenient crisis, INVENT one.

1942 – In Ternopil, western Ukraine, at 4.30 am, German SS organize the first deportation of Jews from Ternopil ghetto to death camp in Belzec, about 5,000 Jews were deported to face death in Belzec. When the Germans captured Ternopil, about 18,000 Jews lived in the city. The horror of REAL Nazis is that 1939-1945 has hundreds of sad dates like this where they loaded up entire populations and sent them off to death camps or to random pits in nearby fields and forests. This is what REAL Nazis did.

1954 – Hurricane Carol (1st major named storm) hits New England, 70 die. FEMA slow to react, Bush widely blamed.

1954 – US Census Bureau forms. In 2009, it is taken over by ACORN.

1971 – Dave Scott becomes first person to drive a car on the moon. That’d be AMERICAN astronaut Dave Scott… And an American car.

1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales and her ‘companion’ Dodi Al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died as a result of a car crash in Paris. Hey! It’s a big deal to a lot of women…

1998 – North Korea reportedly launches Kwangmyongsong, its first satellite. The claim is widely assumed to be bullsh*t.

today in History – 30 August

1146 – European leaders outlaw crossbows, intending to ending war for all time. Except for longbows, lances, pikes, battle flails, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

1836 – The city of Houston is founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen. “Houston” was a lot snappier-sounding than “mosquito-ridden, festering bayou”.

1918
 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror. It’s a little internecine tiff among Communists, but the ensuing Red Terror casts a wide net, snaring anybody a Leninist might not like.

“To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”

And that’s how a handful of radicals gain control of a nation.

1939 – Isoroku Yamamoto appointed supreme commander of Japanese fleet. A couple of years later, he attacks Pearl Harbor. A couple of years after that his butt is dead in the jungle in the South Pacific.

1956 – Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens. Longest continuous over-water bridge in the world. Unfortunately, one end is in New Orleans, making it roughly equivalent to a concrete enema pipe…

1979 – President Jimmy “I never met a despot I didn’t like” Carter attacked by a rabbit on a canoe trip in Plains Ga. This says a lot about the quality of this man’s presidency. I wholly expected Obama to be assaulted by gerbils. “Armageddon!”

2014 – Prime Minister of Lesotho Tom Thabane flees to South Africa as the army allegedly stages a coup. Politics as usual in Africa. Coming soon to a location near you.

2021 – In a stunning foreign policy coup by the Biden administration, the last remaining American troops leave Afghanistan, ending U.S. involvement in the war.

Today in History – 29 August

1786 – Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers, begins in response to high debt and tax burdens.

“I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates … been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth … The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.”

Plough Jogger

1793 – Slaves in French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) freed. The French Revolution comes to Haiti, decapitates the ruling French, and Haiti goes on to become a green jewel in the paradise of the Caribbean. Right?

1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction. It’s powerful and mysterious and provides me with a neat career…

1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patents the world’s first motorcycle.

1910 – The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, also known as the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, becomes effective, officially starting the period of Japanese rule in Korea. It ends in 1945.

1914 – Arizonian is first vessel to arrive in San Francisco via Panama Canal instead of that months-long journey down and around the tip of South America.

1949 – Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. On the same day in 1953, they pop their first hydrogen bomb.

1966 – Leading Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb is executed for plotting the assassination of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Thinking the wrong things, apparently.

1982
 – 38 degrees F – lowest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland in August. Some of that ‘global warming’.

1991 – Supreme Soviet suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party. 2008 – Putin says he don’t need no stinkin’ party to be the dictator…

2005
 – Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 and causing over $115 billion in damage. What? It hit MORE than those poor people in New Orleans? Where’s mah FEMA check? 2017 Update: All those Katrinians we exported to Houston? Looks like we’ll get some back.

Name Game Nope

No birth announcements in today paper, which is no surprise. I may consider alternatives.

At 0800 we were at seventy-eight degrees, heading for the upper eighties, rather cool for the end of August. I’m not complaining.

Two years ago we were entering southwest Louisiana after it was battered (no exaggeration at all) by Hurricane Laura. This year, we have yet to have a hurricane and only three named tropical ‘storms’. Global warmening, you know…

Today in History – 28 August

1565 – Oldest city in the US, St Augustine Florida, established. Immediately overrun by snowbirds…

1830 – The Tom Thumb presages the first railway service in the United States by racing a horse-drawn car. When a belt slipped off, killing the blower to the boiler, the horse won! Besides, all it takes to make a horse is two horses. It took an industrial revolution to make a locomotive.

1837 – Pharmacists John Lea & William Perrins manufacture Worcestershire Sauce. Life is good, even if it’s hard to pronounce.

1859 – The Carrington event – a geomagnetic solar storm – disrupts electrical telegraph services and causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly over the Earth’s middle latitudes. If it happened today the world would be in the dark.

1862
 – American Civil WarSecond Battle of Bull Run Battle of Second Manassas.  The Confederacy won, but General Longstreet’s disobedience here made the victory smaller, and Longstreet later would cost us the Battle of Gettysburg.

1898 – Caleb Bradham’s beverage “Brad’s Drink” is renamed “Pepsi-Cola“.

1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms. The civilization that gave us Aristotle and Pythagoras in antiquity can’t organize, in the words of an English friend, ‘a piss-up in a brewery’ today.

1962
 – 22 inches (55.9 cm) rainfall at Hackberry, Louisiana (state record). Hackberry is about fifteen miles south of me.

1963 – Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech at Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 200,000. Poor, poor deluded man. Who’s gonna believe that “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” nonsense? It was called March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as contrasted by subsequent occasions of March for Free Shit.

1968 – Rioting takes place in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, triggering a brutal police crackdown. Now, one candidate can blatantly STEAL the nomination from another candidate, attend her own coronation, and the sheep bleat happily all the way to the polls.

1981
– The National Centers for Disease Control announce a high incidence of pneumocystis and Kaposi’s Sarcoma in gay men. Soon, these will be recognized as symptoms of an immune disorder, which will be called AIDS. At that point the spread can be prevented by sitting on your butt and keeping your mouth shut… We can apply the same precautions to Monkey pox, but the chances of that being announced by the CDC are exactly nil.

1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa. Between this one and the First Congo War that started in 1996, somewhere between three and six million Africans are killed. Just Africa being Africa…

Trouble brewing

Or it would be, if we have the fuel to heat the water.

Some of you know that I have a peripheral involvement with the natural gas biz, having been hanging around major natural gas facilities for the last twenty years.  Yes, I know – electrical guy – what can I know, right?!?

I pay attention.

2005.  LNG gasification plant I had a part in maintaining and upgrading, its job was to receive shiploads of liquid natural gas from overseas producers, gasify it, and put it into the pipeline for sale to American customers.  Domestic gas prices in 2005 ranged from six to over thirteen dollars per million BTU. Overseas producers pulled gas out of the ground cheap, liquefied it, shipped it, and everybody made a decent profit along the chain.

2011.  American fracking is on line big time.  No more ships showed up at our terminal for the last three years.  You can’t send it to America cheaper than we get our own stuff.  Prices from 2011 to 2021 range from two bucks to six.

American business says, “You know, we’re cheap enough to where we can sell this overseas” and started building liquifaction plants to take American gas, liquefy it, and ship it overseas.

Today.  Europe’s screwed.  They bet the farm on Russian gas, then pissed off the Russians.  While they were happily setting up their dependency on Russian gas for ‘clean’ energy, they were shutting down coal and nuclear, building solar and wind generation.

Solar and wind don’t pull the load when things get real.  And Russia’s pinching down on the gas flow.  And winter’s coming.

And America’s selling every drop of liquid natural gas it can produce, sending most of it to Europe,  and one, it’s not enough, and two, it’s not as cheap as it used to be.  We’re selling gas for over seven bucks in America.  When you add transport costs (somebody has to pay MY pipeline), liquefaction costs (those plants are expensive), shipping costs (specialized vessels that can only haul LNG), regasification costs (expensive plant on the receiving end) and pipelines for delivery, and the Europeans are paying a hundred bucks for gas that costs seven on our side of the pond.

Even if Europe COULD get enough gas to heat homes and keep factories running, They’re paying TEN times the cost for natural gas, which is also translated to other energy costs as natural gas is a preferred fuel for electricity and heat and in many cases, feedstock for chemical production.

They can’t get enough gas.  You point to a piece of property next to a suitable deep-water port, and it’s a MINIMUM of four years before you’re unloading ships there.  Europe simply does not have enough gasification capacity to receive its necessary supply.

Things are likely to get cold in Europe this winter.

Interesting times, folks.

Today in History 27 August

410 – The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths ends after three days. BLM/Antifa/FSA (Free shit Army) riots just go on and on…

1859 – Petroleum discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. World’s first successful oil well. In Canada several polar bears mysteriously drown.

1918
 – Battle of Ambos Nogales: U.S. Army forces skirmish against Mexican Carrancistas and their German advisors in the only battle of World War I fought on American soil.

1927 – Five Canadian women file a petition to the Supreme Court of Canada, asking: “Does the word ‘Persons’ in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?” Answer: It says per-SONS, not per-DAUGHTERS.

1928 – Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war, signed by sixty nations. Ah, yes, the notable “signing a piece of paper will stop crazed lunatics with armies” ploy. WE all KNOW this one works…

1939 – First flight of the Heinkel He 178, the first modern jet aircraft. Nothing quite like the quest for military dominance to further science.

1945 – US troops land in Japan after Japanese surrender. That’d be Dad puttering around the anchorage in Tokyo Bay in a landing craft, playing taxi to the Allied fleet.

1985 – The Nigerian government is peacefully overthrown by Army Chief of Staff Major General Ibrahim Babangida. Politics as it is done in Africa. The Left wants similar actions here.

2003 – Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing approximately 34,646,416 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from Earth. “Dude! Like, you could FEEL the breeze!”

2003 – The first six-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, convene to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Because negotiating with crazed dictators ALWAYS works.

Today in History – 26 August

580 AD – An un-named Chinese invents toilet paper. There are earlier references but historians have nothing to go on…

1346 – Hundred Years’ War: The military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armored knights is established at the Battle of Crécy. Also involved the use of cannon, maybe for the first time in Europe. There is an ‘urban legend’ about an English term derived from this battle that involves the extended middle finger and the words “pluck yew” directed toward the French. The story is not true. The sentiment, however, is…

1789 – Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by Constituent Assembly at Palace of Versailles. Then they went out into the city and made the streets run red with the blood of their decapitated opponents.

1862 – American Civil War: The Second Battle of Bull Run Manassas begins. It ends just like the first one, with a Union defeat.

1883
 – Eruption of Mount Krakatoa. It lowers temperatures worldwide almost two degrees F. That’s the answer to global warming: Just pop a volcano every year or two…

1920 – The 19th amendment to United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote. Suddenly, physical attractiveness becomes a campaign issue.

1944
 – World War II: Charles de Gaulle enters Paris on a road paved with American and Commonwealth blood This is an act somewhat like buying somebody GIVING you a car and you start acting like you’re Henry Ford. Three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers yawn and continue whipping German butt so the haughty Frenchman can act like he really did something… de Gaulle is making speeches and starring in parades while the real battles are being fought elsewhere. We needed the French like a fish needs a bicycle.

1946 – George Orwell published “Animal Farm”. Conservatives read it as a warning. Leftists see it as a textbook.

1966 – The Namibian War of Independence starts with the battle at Omugulugwombashe. As battles go, there was less bloodshed than a Chicago Saturday night.

1985 – French government claims no knowledge of assault on Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace protest vessel sunk in New Zealand on July 10. The French finally win a naval battle in the 20th Century, albeit it’s a bunch of whale-kissing hippies. You’d think they’d want to take credit…