Musk’s and Bezos’s lunatic quarrel – Jupiter and Galileo – The over-used Colorado River – ICUs in Alabama and Mississippi – Evening statistics
Ivan Boesky, the stock trader who became infamous for his prominent role in an insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States during the mid-1980s, once heard his wife remark during a certain night upon the beauty of the moon, to which he responded: “What good is the moon? You can’t buy it or sell it.”
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would beg to differ. Those two determined wheelers-and-dealers are arguing over which of them should possess the moon – or, at any rate, which of them will be the center of attention when NASA resumes astronauts landing on the moon. Musk’s and Bezos’s space companies are developing lunar landers, vehicles capable of landing gently enough to avoid damage when they touch the moon’s rocky surface. Originally NASA handed out three contracts to SpaceX (Musk), Blue Origin (Bezos), and Alabama-based Dynetics, which were intended to initiate development of lunar landers and were worth about $100 million to $600 million each. NASA then planned to select up to two companies to receive the final contracts. When Congress allotted the agency $2 billion less than NASA had originally anticipated, it selected only a single technology, SpaceX. Bezos is now suing the government on behalf of his Blue Origin technology to protest the decision. Protests of this nature, of course, are not uncommon for high-priced government contracts. Resorting to a Twitter war in which each competitor publicly abuses the other’s products, as Musk and Bezos have done, is somewhat more unusual. Both have a personal stake in the matter, since the NASA initiative is being conducted with the eventual goal of building a permanent lunar settlement, and each of two multi-billionaires is anxious to have his name associated with it. There used to be a time when robber barons gratified their vanity by building libraries, endowing museums, subscribing heavily to charities, and in other ways subsiding works of genuine utility with their surplus wealth, but that era is over now.
Jupiter is in opposition with our planet tonight, i.e., it will appear opposite of the sun from the perspective of the Earth. It is the time that Jupiter comes closest in distance to the Earth, so that it not only is easily visible without a telescope, but is close enough for an ordinary modern telescope to view the Galilean moons: the four moons Galileo discovered and recognized as satellites in 1610. This discovery was not accepted by many well-known astronomers and various other authorities of the day, including the Catholic Church, since it went against the Aristotelean cosmology, then generally regarded as infallible, in which all heavenly bodies revolve around the earth. His publication of the discovery was the beginning of the long sorry affair that led to in subjecting Galileo to trials by the Roman Inquisition in 1616 and later in 1633, and ended by placing him in house arrest for the remainder of his life. Much has been written about the cowardice shown by Galileo during his trial; but considerably less is said about the cowardice of the Church in the matter. Yet it is worth remarking upon. During the trials Galileo presented the results of his laborious studies and said, in effect, “Here is the data. Look at it.” And Church responded, “We will not.” The preconceived ideas that the Church had formulated were more important to its representatives than any evidence that suggested that they could have been mistaken. As a result, they closed their eyes when such evidence came to light, and they afterwards closed their minds. Such attitudes among both ecclesiastic and secular authorities are not unknown in modern times, as the events of the past year and a half during the pandemic have shown.
Greeley, CO, is a booming town; both the city and Weld County, in which it is located, have grown in population by 30% in the last ten years, one of the fastest growing regions in the nation. It has a pleasant climate, since it usually does not experience fully developed storm systems; warm fronts, sleet, and freezing rain are virtually unknown in the area. Nighttime low temperatures never rise above 68 degrees, even during the hottest summers. Principal employer firms are numerous, and they include JBS USA (meatpacking), the North Colorado Medical Center, the county government, the University of Northern Colorado, and State Farm Insurance. Its Union Colony Civic Center is one of the largest performing arts venues in the state. The North Colorado Medical Center, the primary source of health care for the county, is a state-of-the-art facility. Moreover, the city is less than an hours’ drive from Denver and the numerous cultural facilities that the state capital contains. Crime rate is significantly lower than the national average. For a mid-sized city (slightly over 100,000 population, as per the last estimate given in 2019) it has a fairly extensive public transportation system, with seven different bus routes, a regional bus service that connects the city to Fort Collins and Windsor, and buses to Denver and to Buffalo, WY. It would appear that Greeley has everything going for it – everything but one, that is: namely, water.
As with so many cities in the American West, Greeley is largely dependent upon the much-beleaguered Colorado River, which at this point has been declared by the Federal government as undergoing a water shortage, the first time in the river’s history. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is at its lowest ebb since it was first formed in the 1930s. Mandatory water cuts have been instituted throughout the Southwest. Arizona will see an 18% reduction of its total Colorado River Supply and Nevada will lose about 7%. Colorado, being among the Upper Basin states, is not affected by the cuts directly. However, the Colorado River Compact obligates the Bureau of Reclamation to release an annual average of 8.23 million acre-feet from Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. Runoff into Lake Powell this year is about 30% of the average yearly amount, and to make up for the shortfall, the Bureau of Reclamation will release more water from three Upper Basin reservoirs: Flaming Gorge in Utah, Blue Mesa in Colorado, and Navajo on the Colorado-New Mexico border. Yet people apparently look upon the river as inexhaustible and continue to flock to areas in the proximity of Denver, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix as if they were as well-watered as the Aleutian Islands or the west coast of Norway.
There are now no unoccupied ICU beds in Alabama. As of today, there are 29 more patients than there are beds available in the entire state. Hospital staffers have been forced to convert hallways, regular patient rooms and emergency spaces into areas where they can treat patients in need of ICU room. The state has a rate of 35% of its population vaccinated, the second lowest in the country. Mississippi, which now has the lowest vaccination rate of all states, is in a similar situation, with only 7 ICU beds available statewide. Dr. Jawauna Stewart, a hospital worker at Hattiesburg Clinic Hospital Care Service, has said that one of the most difficult aspects of her job now is to talk with the families of patients about treatment plans: “To be honest, that’s one of the most frustrating things because I rarely have good news.”
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 210,784,682; # of deaths worldwide: 4,416,088; # of cases U.S.: 38,228,384; # of deaths; U.S.: 643,091.