Six Feet Apart; 35,000 Feet Above Dear Daily Prophecy Reader, "Yes, we are on a long, lonely trail…" writes the inimitable poet of prophecies Bill Bonner, "wandering around between life and death… between six feet apart and six feet under…" The heck with that, I decided. Under the guidance of my aeronautical son Richard, I took off for 35 thousand feet over the land on 737 Boeing jets. For brief cherished moments, I could reach altitudes more than five thousand times higher than the Bonner trail. I could wantonly violate social distancing with friends across the country. My airborne trail took me west to Minneapolis, through bleak wastes of airports sparsely populated with furtive figures in masks, to collaborate on monthlies with my colleague and editor Richard Vigilante. Together with John Schroeter and Steve Waite, Richard mans and guides our exemplary Gilder Press writing team after some twenty years of investment experience as an executive at WhiteBox Advisors, following his role as editor-in-chief and best-seller alchemist at Regnery Publishing. During my visit, we explored a number of cosmic companies that lead our new paradigm and came up with exciting investments for the next two issues of The Gilder Report. Meanwhile, the amazing Schroeter, hitherto known as polymathic Mr. X, has been exploring the exotic realms of smaller company innovation and science with Steve Waite for coming Moonshots and Millionaire's Club specials, with 100X potential. After a career in such chip companies as Micron and Impinj, "Imagineer" Schroeter is a master of technology. Author of a canonical text on chip design, he is co-author of the award-winning book Moonshots, editor this year of the superb Futurist compendium After-Shock, and holder of several key patents in Radio Frequency identification (RFID) technology of the coming internet of things. These guys are the driving force behind Gilder Press. But in order to do my reports and prophecies, I have to transcend my lonely Bonner trail between six feet apart and six feet under. Droughts over the Centuries Beyond the direct investment realm, my favorite newsletter, the one I tear open every month when it arrives at my door by US Mail, is The Energy Advocate written by Howard Hayden, former Physics Chair at the University of Connecticut and author of several searing books about the use and abuse of science. Although I do much of my reading online, I have to confess that I welcome the arrival of paper at my door for certain crucial messages, such as Howard's lucid science update. It represents one part of a bifurcation of Petr Beckmann's exemplary Access to Energy letter which Petr stopped writing on his death in 1993. Access to Energy remains an important read, but its author Arthur Robinson, Caltech chemist supreme, is now focused on his stirring political races in Oregon, where he attempts to alert his state and the world to the catastrophes of consensus science. No ideologue, Hayden is all science and education, but even he raised the pitch of his rhetoric in the current issue. Addressing an April 16 New York Times article by Henry Fountain attributing droughts in the Southwest to "climate change," Hayden pointed out that current droughts are far less extensive and severe than the "megadroughts" of the past, long before the industrial revolution. One previous drought in the 13th century lasted some 90 years and came between the Medieval Climate Optimum and the rise of the Little Ice Age when the planet was cooling. As for the current Southwestern drought, he publishes a chart from NOAA that shows repeated ups and downs but no perceptible trend in precipitation in the Western US over the last 100 years. Hayden demonstrates that the mistakes in The New York Times and across the US academy and media largely stem from a reliance on computer models that fail to address obvious historic facts such as the Medieval warming, the Little Ice Age, and the dates of the Industrial Revolution. |
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