PRESIDENT KNOW NOTHING

What happens when the President doesn’t know, and won't listen

From The Guardian 27 September 2018

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short, reveals how Trump’s bungled presidential transition set the template for his time in the White House

Chris Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.

Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.

And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.

Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.

By August, 130 people were showing up every day, and hundreds more working part-time, at Trump transition headquarters, on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The transition team made lists of likely candidates for all 500 jobs, plus other lists of informed people to roll into the various federal agencies the day after the election, to be briefed on whatever the federal agencies were doing. They gathered the names for these lists by travelling the country and talking to people: Republicans who had served in government, Trump’s closest advisers, recent occupants of the jobs that needed filling. Then they set about investigating any candidates for glaring flaws and embarrassing secrets and conflicts of interest. At the end of each week, Christie handed over binders, with lists of names of people who might do the jobs well, to Kushner, Donald Jr and the others. “They probed everything,” says a senior Trump transition official. “‘Who is this person?’ ‘Where did this person come from?’ They only ever rejected one person: Manafort’s secretary.”

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

Here Christie and Bannon parted ways. Neither thought it was a good idea to shut down the transition, but each had his own misgivings. Christie thought that Trump had little chance of running the government without a formal transition. Bannon wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal government; he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said: “What do you think Morning Joe will say if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe would say – or at least what Bannon thought it would say – was that Trump was closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any chance of being president.

See also:
White Supremacists
Political Extremes
Alarmist Hot Air

Media Bias and Fake News

Trump stopped hollering. For the first time he seemed to have listened.

“That makes sense,” he said.

With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the news, but that proved difficult. From time to time, Trump would see something in the paper about Christie’s fundraising and become upset all over again. The money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

At that moment in American history, if you could somehow organise the entire population into a single line, all 350 million people, ordered not by height or weight or age but by each citizen’s interest in the federal government, and Donald Trump loitered somewhere near one end of it, Max Stier would occupy the other.

By the autumn of 2016, Stier might have been the American with the greatest understanding of how the US government worked. Oddly, for an American of his age and status, he had romanticised public service since he was a child. He had gone through Yale in the mid-80s and Stanford law school in the early 90s without ever being tempted by money or anything else. He thought the US government was the single most important and interesting institution in the history of the planet and could not imagine doing anything but working to improve it. A few years out of law school he had met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Stier was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Stier persuaded Heyman to set aside $25m for him so that he might create an organisation to address the problem.

Stier soon realised that to attract talented young people to government service, he would need to turn the government into a place that talented young people wanted to work. He would need to fix the US government. Partnership for Public Service, as Stier called his organisation, was not nearly as dull as its name. It trained civil servants to be business managers; it brokered new relationships across the federal government; it surveyed the federal workforce to identify specific management failures and success; and it lobbied Congress to fix deep structural problems. It was Stier who had persuaded Congress to pass the laws that made it so annoyingly difficult for Trump to avoid preparing to be president.

Anyway, from the point of view of a smart, talented person trying to decide whether to work for the US government, the single most glaring defect was the absence of an upside. The jobs were not well-paid compared with their equivalents in the private sector. And the only time government employees were recognised was if they screwed up – in which case they often became the wrong kind of famous. In 2002, Stier created an annual black tie, Oscars-like awards ceremony to celebrate people who had done extraordinary things in government.

Every year the Sammies – as Stier called them, in honour of his original patron – attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year, the list of achievements was mind-blowing. A guy in the energy department (Frazer Lockhart) organised the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in 60 years early and $30bn under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the US government. They just never got told.

Stier knew an astonishing number of them. He had detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

That was maybe Stier’s biggest challenge: explaining the value of this enterprise at the centre of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no control. He would explain that the federal government provided services that the private sector could not or would not: medical care for veterans, air traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines. He would explain that the federal government was an engine of opportunity: millions of American children, for instance, would have found it even harder than they did to make the most of their lives without the basic nutrition supplied by the federal government. When all else failed, he would explain the many places the US government stood between Americans and the things that might kill them. “The basic role of government is to keep us safe,” he would say.

The US government employed 2 million people, 70% of them one way or another in national security. It managed a portfolio of risks that no private person or corporation was able to manage. Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most were not: the risk, say, that some prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the Vietnam war. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government, might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.

Enter the presidential transition. A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen. Even before Stier created an organisation to fix the federal government, the haphazard nature of presidential transitions drove him nuts. “We have a legacy government that hasn’t kept up with the world we live in, largely because of disruptions from bad transitions,” he said. “People don’t understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.” The new people taking over the job of running the government were at best only partially informed, and often deeply suspicious, of whatever happened to be going on before they arrived. By the time they fully grasped the problems they were dealing with, it was time to go. “It’s Groundhog Day,” said Stier. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say: ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”

Most of the big problems inside the US government were of the practical management sort and had nothing to do with political ideology. A mundane but important example was how hard it was for any government agency to hire new people. Some agencies couldn’t hire anyone without 60 different people signing off on him. The George W Bush administration had begun to attack that particular mundane problem. The Obama administration, instead of running with the work done during the Bush years, had simply started all over again.

Stier’s Partnership for Public Service had helped to push through three separate laws related to the transition. In 2010, Congress gave free office space and other resources to the nominees of the two major political parties immediately after the summer conventions. “The reason campaigns didn’t prepare is that they thought it would cost them politically: no one wanted to be seen measuring the drapes,” said Stier. “The idea was to give the nominees of the major political parties cover to do what they should do.” In 2011-2012, to enable the president to put people in jobs more quickly, Congress reduced the number of presidential appointments that required Senate confirmation from about 1,400 to roughly 1,200 – still more than 1,000 too many, in Stier’s view, but a start. Finally, in 2015, Congress required the sitting president to prepare in various ways to hand the government over to his or her successor. The person who had already taken the test was now required by law to help the person who may not have studied for it.

As the 2016 presidential election approached, Stier was about as hopeful as he had ever been that the US government would be handed from one leader to another with minimum stupidity. His partnership had worked with both the Clinton and the Trump campaigns. “Their work was good,” said Stier. He was disappointed with Obama in some ways. Obama had been slow to engage with the federal workforce. He had appointed some poor managers to run some agencies. The fiasco of the rollout of HealthCare.gov was not an accident but a byproduct of bad management. But Obama’s preparations to hand over the government had been superb: the Obama administration had created what amounted to the best course ever on the inner workings of the most powerful institution on earth. What could go wrong?

Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.

Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like ... I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but also stepped down from his job.)

After meeting with Pence, Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children, Kushner and the other members of Trump’s inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn was a jobseeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of. Now he wanted to be named Trump’s national security adviser, which was maybe the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national security team inside the Trump transition – staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials – had thought that was an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name was not on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he would like to have.

Before Christie could intercede, Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie.

It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out.

Why? asked Christie, stunned.

We’re making a change.

“Okay, what are we changing?

You.

Why?

It’s really not important.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life. The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell reporters that Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.”

In the days after the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building.

It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”

They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

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This is an edited extract from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, published by Penguin on 2 October.To order a copy for £17.20 (RRP £20), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

GLOBAL COOLING

Global cooling could be devastating for the planet and people

Global Cooling: 2017-2053

'Cosmic Rays & Risks of Frequent Flying'
Pilots & Flight Attendants Warned To Be Careful

by Theodore White, astromet.sci

For years I have been doing my best to warn the world of the coming dangers from climate change that begins in outer space.

The ignorant, those pushing 'man-made global warming,' often ridicule because that is what the lack of knowledge does, but it is a fact that our planet, the Earth, lives in outer space.

And it is in space where the other planets in our solar system and the Sun - the star that governs our planet's climate - also live.

Space is where all the climate conditions and weather begin.

The dangers coming from outer space can and do cause serious problems on Earth and my specialty is to forecast these problems in advance so that preparations can be made to remain safe.

If you stay with me in this forecast post, I will explain what is happening, and why it is very important for you to take action before matters become much worse going into the coming decade of the 2020s.

Now,

The Sun's Grand Minimum, due to its reduced magnetic and ultraviolet activity means climate change - and that means global cooling for the Earth.

Global cooling is bad for the Earth.

The Sun, when operating at maximum or near maximum output, is the cause of global warming, which is good for the Earth.

Those who claim that global warming is bad for the Earth are ignorant and do not know what they are talking about.

Moreover, you cannot find a single individual among them who has ever forecasted a single weather and climate event in advance based on their fallacies and fiction.

When the Sun reduces its electromagnetic activity, it goes into a kind of 'sleep mode.'

These sleep modes are in fact quiescent phases, when there is reduced magnetic activity and few to no sunspots at all seen on the Sun's surface.

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These quiescent phases are called solar minimums.

There are various levels of minimums, to weak minimums to to very strong minimums.

The Earth has gone through ice ages before due to solar minimums, with increased seismic and volcanic activity as well caused by the Sun's reduced magnetic activity.

I have called for the start of a very strong Grand Solar Minimum, which will dominate the Earth's climate over the next 36 years.

In effect, a mini 'ice age,' or global cooling, which is bad for the Earth and its inhabitants.

Because of the Sun's coming Grand Minimum, I've also warned about the radical changes to the Earth's jet streams and wind patterns in how storms will become more frequent and powerful with torrents of precipitation in the form of rain and snow during respective seasons in both hemispheres.

The increase in clouds and torrential rains have already begun in fact. Google 'floods' and 'torrential rains' in the 'news' section to see how these events are spreading worldwide, as I've long forecasted it would.

I have also warned airlines about increased turbulence for aircraft due to the radical shifts in jet stream behavior.

It also means that as the Sun's heliosphere (the protective shield over all the planets of our solar system) weakens, it has allowed high-speed radioactive particles in the form of galactic cosmic rays to penetrate our atmosphere.

More proof of the coming of global cooling is the fact that the Sun’s Heliosphere has weakened by 25 percent over the last decade.

It is now at its lowest level than it was more than 51 years ago.

Our entire solar system is made up of the Sun’s Heliosphere that is formed by the Sun’s winds.

The Heliosphere is a protective bubble of sorts, with a combination of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields that move more than a million miles an hour from the Sun.

The Sun’s charged winds meet up with cosmic, or intergalactic gas that fills the gaps in outer space between solar systems.

At the boundary point where they meet; what is called a 'shock wave' or 'shock boundary' is formed which deflects dangerous clouds of gas and dust that are the interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy.

These clouds of gas and dust between stars are also known as dark clouds, or cosmic radiation.

These dark clouds can block the light coming from particular stars.

They act as a kind of interstellar medium that surrounds our Sun’s Heliosphere.

The Heliosphere of the Sun creates a bubble of protection from speed of light travelling atomic particles that are hazardous to the climates of planets, like our Earth.

The Sun’s heliosphere is dynamic and it is a major part of what I monitor as an astrometeorologist; including angular momentum of the outer planets in our solar system that alters the path of our Sun relative and the impacts on the Earth's climate.

The heliosphere can enlarge or shrink according to the density of the interstellar medium or the dark clouds that surrounds it.

Cosmic rays are atom fragments that rain down on the Earth from outside our solar system. Since the last decade I have been very concerned about the penetration of cosmic rays to the Earth.

They travel at the speed of light and have been blamed for electronics problems in satellites and other machinery.

Because these highly-dense dark clouds can shrink the Sun’s heliosphere, at the same time they also can help to weaken the Earth’s protective shield from cosmic rays and that impacts our climate.

Understand clearly that cosmic rays constantly rain down on Earth.

Every second, each and every square centimeter of the Earth is struck by about 10,000 cosmic rays.

These charged subatomic particles from outer space can attain very high energies. They are a mixture of high-energy photons and subatomic particles accelerated toward Earth by supernova explosions and other violent space events.

Our best line of defense is the Sun, because the magnetic field and solar wind combine to create the heliosphere which normally fends off cosmic rays attempting to enter our solar system.

Their flow is particularly intense in the Arctic and Antarctica as they are attracted by the high magnetic field at the Earth’s poles.

While the high-energy primary rays collide with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere and rarely make it through to the ground, there are many secondary particles ejected from collisions and they do reach us on the surface.

With the Sun's reduced magnetic output and weakened solar wind, the result is global cooling and that has been my climate forecast for a long time.

According to my calculations, global cooling officially began in mid-December 2017 and will last 36 years.

It will affect everyone on Earth and already has started; especially the increase in cosmic ray penetration.

Cosmic rays can seed more clouds and therefore increase the precipitation action in the troposphere. Cosmic rays also can trigger more lightning.

There are also are studies that link cosmic rays with increased cardiac arrhythmias in the general population.

Some people may think that concerns about cosmic rays is nothing more than imagination, but cosmic rays are very real and have been increasing.

For example, that was the conclusion of a scientific paper published in the research journal Space Weather.

The authors, led by Professor Nathan Schwadron of the University of New Hampshire, confirmed that radiation from deep space is very dangerous and intensifying faster than previously predicted.

Schwadron and his team colleagues first sounded their alarm in 2014 about cosmic rays.

They discovered that cosmic rays in the Earth-Moon system were peaking at levels never before seen in the Space Age.

The worsening radiation environment, they pointed out, was a potential peril to astronauts, curtailing how long they could safely travel through space.

A figure from their original 2014 paper showed that the number of days a 30-year old male astronaut flying in a spaceship with 10 g/cm2 of aluminum shielding could go before hitting NASA-mandated radiation limits.

In the 1990s, an astronaut could spend 1,000 days in interplanetary space.

In 2014 it was down to only 700 days.

"That's a huge change," said Schwadron.

The protection of the Sun and its heliosphere when the Sun is at maximum protects us.

The problem is, as the authors noted, is that the heliosphere has been weakening:

"Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic field strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age.

"As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays."

Back in 2014, Schwadron used a leading model of solar activity to predict how bad cosmic rays would become during the next Solar Minimum, now expected in 2019-2020.

"Our previous work suggested a ~ 20% increase of dose rates from one solar minimum to the next," says Schwadron.

"In fact, we now see that actual dose rates observed in the last 4 years exceed the predictions by ~ 10% - showing that the radiation environment is worsening even more rapidly than we expected."

Sensors show that since 2014-2015 that there has been a 13% increase in radiation (X-rays and gamma-rays) penetrating our planet's atmosphere.

X-rays and gamma-rays detected by sensors are secondary cosmic rays that are produced by the crash of primary cosmic rays into Earth's upper atmosphere.

They trace radiation percolating down toward our planet's surface.

The energy range of the sensors (10 keV to 20 MeV) is similar to that of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.

It has been my forecast for a long time that as the Sun begins its Grand Minimum and the Earth enters the climate of global cooling that cosmic rays will intensify much more in the 2020s.

What are some of the effects?

Well, some people do not know that cosmic rays do in fact penetrate commercial airlines and dose passengers and flight crews to the point that frequent fliers, pilots and flight attendants can now be classified by the International Commission on Radiological Protection as occupational radiation workers.

Yes, it is true.

Frequent flyers on airlines, especially pilots and flight attendants are at very high risk, not only from the altered jet streams and extreme turbulence, but also from cosmic rays.

It is a little-known fact that pilots and flight attendants are being exposed to more cosmic radiation than nuclear power plant employees.

Consider this,

In spring 2018, a new study found that American flight attendants are at an increased risk for several types of cancers.

This is from radiation exposure at higher altitudes as there are less atmospheric protection against cosmic radiation from space. Other threats are circadian rhythm disruption.

For the latest study, published in the journal Environmental Health, researchers used data from the Harvard Flight Attendant Health Survey, which included responses from more than 5,300 flight attendants.

They compared those findings to data from nearly 3,000 adults with similar socioeconomic backgrounds: participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

The results showed that for women, breast cancer was 1.5 times as prevalent in flight attendants as compared to in the general public.

Melanoma was twice as prevalent and nonmelanoma skin cancers (such as basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas) were 4 times as prevalent.

Flight attendants also had higher rates of uterine, cervical, thyroid and gastrointestinal cancers.

In a release, study author Irina Mordukhovich, a research fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the findings “striking,” given the low rates of obesity and smoking in the flight attendants - 8 percent of participating flight attendants were current smokers, compared to 16 percent of the NHANES respondents.

So what’s to blame for the prevalence of cancer in flight attendants?

Although the study didn’t identify a cause (that wasn’t its purpose) Mordukhovich and her colleagues offered up a few potential explanations, including flight attendants’ exposure to cosmic ionizing radiation (or radiation from outer space).

We’re exposed to small amounts of ionizing radiation all the time, though our atmosphere offers some degree of protection.

At higher altitudes, where the air is thinner, more radiation gets through, which some researchers speculate may increase your cancer risk.

“Cabin crew have the largest annual ionizing radiation dose of all U.S. workers,” pointed out study's authors.

Radiation dose is measured in millisievert per year (mSv) and previous research has shown that the average dose for cabin crews is 3.07 mSv, compared to 0.59 mSv for U.S. Department of Energy workers.

Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere normally shields us from much of the radiation from space, but the Earth's magnetic field is weakening as is the Sun's heliosphere and more cosmic rays are easily penetrating the Earth.

An instrument aboard the Curiosity Mars Rover during its 253-day journey to Mars revealed that the radiation dose received by an astronaut on even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert.

This amount is like receiving a whole-body CT scan every 5 or 6 days.

A dose of 1 sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in the risk of fatal cancers.

The normal daily radiation dose received by the average person living on Earth is 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sievert).

Those interested in learning how to protect themselves should read this very sad cautionary tale of a female Korean Airlines flight attendant and her life and death struggle from exposure to cosmic radiation while working on commercial airlines.

This article by Theodore White was posted on Facebook group THE GLOBAL WARMING RATIONAL DEBATE GROUP     https://www.facebook.com/groups/1137138173085884/

WINGS OVER WAHAROA – TWO

When flying was for birds and dare-devils, and when pilots flew while birds were grounded

The second in a series that will lead to publication of the book Wings Over Waharoa in this 60^th year of the Piako Gliding Club.

The Piako Gliding Club’s first glider, Rhonlerche II ZK-GBO was damaged in an accident in July 1958. It collided with the tow plane, Tiger Moth ZK-AQA. A new wing needed to be imported from Germany. But there was a problem.

At the end of 1957 there had been a change of government, the new government faced a balance of payments crisis and Finance Minister Arnold Nordmeyer issued his famous Black Budget, which, among other measures, placed severe restrictions on imports. For a time, it was feared that the club might not survive without a flyable glider. Meanwhile, members kept the revenue flowing with private flights in the otherwise unemployed tow plane until an import licence was finally granted and gliding started again on February 21, 1959.

In those early times everyone was on a learning curve, and with little regulation, incidents and accidents were common.

Rhonlerche II ZK-GBO

The club’s two machines, ZK-GBO and tow plane ZK-AQA were involved in a comedy of errors at Tahuroa, near Morrinsville, on April 7, 1960, that could have seen both aircraft damaged beyond repair. AQA, flown by Peter Blakeborough, had towed GBO, flown by Tony Littlejohn, to Hamilton for maintenance. On the return flight, noticing that AQA had suddenly found extra airspeed, Peter looked over his shoulder in time to see GBO (the Little Stinker) heading for a steep topdressing strip. Tony had inexplicable released the tow. He made a good landing on the strip, stopping half-way up with room for AQA to pass to one side. Peter landed and taxied to the level loading area at the top and together they hauled GBO to the top of the strip ready for take-off. After a council of war, a phone call to Les Marshall, who lived in Morrinsville, brought him to the strip to fly AQA so that Peter could fly GBO with Tony as passenger. A strategy was devised whereby the Tiger Moth, famous for not having brakes, would idle slowly off the edge of the loading area, taking up the slack as it proceeded downhill. But this was a serious miscalculation. The strip was steep enough for the Tiger to get airborne without the propeller doing anything. It was thought that when the slack was taken up, the two aircraft would take-off normally. That was the plan. But it didn’t quite work out that way. Immediately the tug was clear of the level loading area, it quickly gathered momentum, the rope tightened equally quickly, and in less than its own length, GBO was catapulted into space, immediately catching up with the tug. Les continued his downhill take-off while Peter, already airborne, used spoilers to stay in position and thereby avoided towing the tug. The two aircraft then returned to Waharoa without further incident.

DH Tiger Moth ZK-AQA

Two days later April 9, 1960, GBO was involved another adventure that was possibly a first for Piako, and possibly a first for any New Zealand gliding club. At an air pageant at Whakatane three gliders performed formation aerobatics, including loops and stall turns followed by a maximum speed downwind run before landing from a 180 degree turn. That was not easy for two Rhonlerches formating with a faster Slingsby Skylark II. The aircraft were Skylark ZK-GBM from the Auckland Gliding Club, ZK-GBO (Peter Blakeborough) and Rhonlerche ZK-GBQ (M. Kirk) from the Tauranga Gliding Club. The pageant was to mark the opening of Whakatane Airport. (Some of this information may be in need of correction)

The Rhonlerche was a trainer with limited soaring capabilities. It could handle thermals that were close to the home base at Waharoa and it could make a downwind return to the airfield from the easterly Kaimai Range wave, provided the pilot kept a close watch on height and distance. On Saturday September 3, 1960, the club began a new type of operation that would enable ridge flying in a westerly wind. The Montague family at Gordon offered the use of their farm airstrip, a flat paddock, within easy distance of the Kaimai Range. For most Piako members, ridge flying was a new and enjoyable experience and by Sunday night Ross Carmichael, Peter De Renzy, Stuart Rogerson and John Cresswell had flown solo on the ridge in GBO.

MORE:
Wings Over Waharoa 1
Ag. Flying in New Zealand
Mobile Flight Simulator
Missing Airliners
All in a Day's Flying

Tiger Moth ZK-AQA was involved in numerous incidents with the Piako Gliding Club during its three years of service. One incident highlights the adage, ‘There are lots of young bold pilots, but few old bold pilots.’ Les Marshall in AQA, and Peter Blakeborough in GBO, decided one foggy winter morning in 1960 to check out the ceiling. Several members were keen to fly, and the crew were keen to see them airborne. The fog seemed to lift a little and the tug and glider took off.

Unfortunately, at about 200 feet both aircraft entered cloud and Houston had a problem. Fortunately, Les had completed the instrument flying part of his commercial pilot training just days before and Peter was just able to keep him in murky view at the other end of the rope. The Rhonlerche had only an airspeed indicator, altimeter and variometer. Without the tow plane as his artificial horizon, Peter would have been doomed within seconds. He carefully followed the minor control surface movements of AQA, keeping his wings level with the tug, while Les executed a 180 degree turn. For an age they flew downwind on reduced power. Then the small control surface movements indicated another turn for Peter to follow. Then the power came all the way back and Peter opened the spoilers to stay in position. A short time later, the trees on Jagger Road (now removed) at the approach end of Runway 10 slipped by with ample clearance. The runway, clubhouse and hangar also appeared, both aircraft landed safely, and that would have been the end of the escapade, but for a third aircraft that appeared out of the fog.

AQA and GBO had barely rolled to a stop when a Piper Apache landed alongside them and taxied to the pump. On board was Civil Aviation inspector George Arkley. George took Les aside for a stern lecture on flight safety, after which he relaxed somewhat and thanked Les for saving his life. He explained that he had been flying from Wellington to Auckland but diverted to Hamilton because of fog in Auckland. But when he got overhead Hamilton, it had closed too. He decided to fly to Tauranga, but halfway there he realised he didn’t have enough fuel to make it. With no airports available he was looking for holes in the fog when he just happened to catch a glimpse of a Tiger Moth with a Rhonlerche on tow, so he followed in a wide circle to compensate for the Apache’s higher speed.

For some time after this incident, it was remembered as the day that Les Marshall saved three lives, including his own.

In those early days there was often times when the best of plans failed to go according to plan. One such day was when Arthur Bull, and aero club instructor from Tauranga, visited to sign tow ratings for some Piako pilots. The requirement at the time called for both tester and applicant to demonstrate that they could operate from both ends of the rope. So, Arthur flew the glider while the local pilot flew the tug. Then they swapped places, and everything went to plan until the glider pilot released the rope whereupon the tug pilot released his end too. Members spent the rest of the day looking for the rope, the only one the club had, but like Houdini, its escape was complete. The rope was never seen again.

ZK-AQA was a good performer due to its large diameter metal propeller, an unusual feature on a Tiger Moth, which increased the climb rate while aiding with engine cooling on long climbs. It also had wing slats which lowered the stalling speed and improved low speed handling. The metal propeller was heavier than standard wood propellers and was inclined to run on for a time after shutting down. It also had a larger diameter and these two qualities suddenly became a burden one Sunday when AQA was being put to bed for the night. Someone waved Les Marshall right into the hangar, but to be on the safe side he cut the switches immediately after a short burst of power to get the wheels over the hangar door tracks. AQA kept rolling forward and the prop continued to rotate, the propeller tips grazed the steel rafters, and a fireworks display lit up the hangar in the fading light.

Highway America

On Christmas Eve, 1960, ZK-AQA had an unscheduled brush with Terra Firma that resulted in substantial damage. Meanwhile, aircraft loaned from the Waikato Aero Club kept members flying while a search was mounted for parts. That was in the days when it was commonly believed that sobriety came immediately after downing the last drink, and it was safe to drive and/or fly immediately. The incident happened early in the morning and was therefore quite unexpected, as accidents usually are. Les Marshall towed the Rhonlerche into the blue and immediately returned to Waharoa to await the next launch. It must be said that in those days flying and gliding were less regulated than in later years and there was always a degree of experimentation with the way things were done. It was common practice to drop the tow rope before landing. This was sometimes accomplished with a high-speed, low-level run downwind, a little like an elated Spitfire pilot returning from a successful mission, with the rope landing as close as possible to the duty pilot’s feet. It was felt that landing with the rope trailing behind was bad for the rope, especially if it dragged over a fence. So, following the downwind dash, the tug would pull up into a steep turn, power would be cut, and a steep slipping turn would place it on the ground and clear of the runway before the glider approached. This day, Les did everything perfectly until it was time to straighten up from the steep slipping turn, and AQA would have been history except for some brilliant team work and the sudden appearance of main planes and other bits and pieces, several weeks later. After two days of hectic work, on a balmy moonlight night, ZK-AQA survived a test flight at the hands of Wally Christofferson of Tauranga, who also supervised the rebuilding. The test flight included some low-level aerobatics and a dead-stick landing. It was all typical of the times.

That was 60 years ago. Flying and gliding are much safer now, and that is how it should be.

In this 60^th year, the history of the Piako Gliding Club is soon to be published in a book and assistance would be appreciated with photos of people, places, events and aircraft, along with documents, records and stories. If you can help, please contact Peter Blakeborough at peterblakeborough@gmail.com or call on 021-115-0543.

PEER REVIEW DOUBTS

Is peer review really the Holy Grail of science?

For 300 years peer reviewed papers have served science and scholarly publishing without question, until recently. In the words of Wikipedia, peer review works like this:

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility in academia. Scholarly review is often used to determine an academic paper’s suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs.

In a nutshell, peer review helps validate research findings submitted to science journals for publication. The journal will invite other scientists and researchers to comment on the paper before deciding to publish it. The review may take one of several forms. The single blind review is one in which the name(s) of the reviewer(s) are hidden from the author. In a double-blind review the reviewer’s and author’s names are not disclosed. Finally, there is the open review in which the author and reviewer are known to each other. Each review type has its own advantages and disadvantages and there is no perfect system. Personal bias can, and often does, play a part, and the author, whether the name is revealed or not, can often be identified by the writing style or topic, and a reviewer may be influenced by the standing, or lack of standing, of the author.

Acceptance of established scientific principles can change over time and an author with a paper revealing new discoveries may often receive an adverse review from a reviewer who supports the status quo or simply goes with the consensus opinion. History is full of discoveries that were harshly criticized by the establishment but later became mainstream thinking.

In 2006, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published this:

Peer review is at the heart of the processes of not just medical journals but of all of science. It is the method by which grants are allocated, papers published, academics promoted, and Nobel prizes won. Yet it is hard to define. It has until recently been unstudied. And its defects are easier to identify than its attributes. Yet it shows no sign of going away. Famously, it is compared with democracy: a system full of problems but the least worst we have.

Perhaps the most damning comment come from The Guardian:

Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

Journals themselves can be biased and actively seeking research findings that suit the publisher’s bias and seeking reviews from reviewers known to also be biased. This makes a mockery of peer reviewing. 

See also:
Media Bias and Fake News
Climate Cyber Bullies
Australia and Climate Change
Elections and Social Media

During the lifetime of this writer, many changes to CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) have taken place. But each change found bitter resistance because the current method was developed by ‘experts’ and peer reviewed to give it extra authority. My introduction to CPR in the 1950’s, then known as artificial resperation, was to learn the Holger Neilsen technique for use in reviving workmates who had been ‘killed’ by contact with electric power transmission lines. We practised on ‘victims’ hanging in safety harness 30 feet above the ground. The rescuer would climb a ladder, secure his own harness, and perform the revival from behind the victim by moving his arms back and forth to fill the lungs and restart breathing. I never knew of a case where it worked, but it was a universally accepted technique. Present day first aid people would scoff at such an idea, but in its day the Holger Nielsen technique was only questioned by fools, sceptics and agitators. While peer review can help introduce revolutionary new scientific discoveries, it can also block the acceptance of new scientific discoveries.

Economist Professor George J. Borjas

Economics is a field where opinion and data are often disputed, always has been disputed and probably always will be disputed. It is a controversial area of learning. Professor George J. Borjas wrote in his blog:

I have a few pet peeves. One of them is how “peer review” is perceived by far too many people as the gold standard certification of scientific authority. Any academic who’s been through the peer review process many times (as I have) knows that the process is full of potholes and is sometimes subverted by unethical behaviour on the part of editors and reviewers.

Unethical behaviour? Some authors have even been caught peer reviewing their own work.

In recent years the peer review system has become such a shambles that some of the leading journals now knock back everything that doesn’t conform to their own pre-conceived idea of the world and the way it should be. This is the exact opposite of what peer review was supposed to achieve.

Holger Louis Nielsen, Danish Olympian
and creator of Holger Nielsen
artificial respiration

Mention has already been made of economics and CPR and how change has been opposed. Man-made climate change, and its dire consequences for the planet, has found widespread public acceptance. But, interestingly, it has found less acceptance in the academic community, particularly among meteorologists, climate scientists, geologists and historians. But they are largely shouted down by those citing peer reviewed papers.

Peer review is frequently used, by those claiming scientific backgrounds, to silence people who lack a PhD in some scientific discipline. On social media these people, and those citing their work, frequently lambast their critics as ignorant, or challenge them to list their own peer reviewed papers. The idea that anyone without a PhD and a peer reviewed paper is of no consequence, or is an ignorant meaningless individual, is repugnant.

I wonder, if John D. Rockefeller were alive today, would the ivory tower crackpots want to peer review his business plan and tell him it wouldn’t work because he hadn’t been to university. Astronaut John Glenn, author Mark Twain, and industrialist Henry Ford would have failed the PhD/peer review test too. To that list can be added William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Branson, Ted Turner, George Eastman and John Major. All dropped out of school before obtaining a degree. Are we to believe that government funded researchers are smarter than the successful men listed above? I don’t think so.

It is easy to write-off people who are uneducated. When I was growing up in rural Northland, New Zealand, I was fortunate to live next door to one of the wisest and most respected men I have ever known. He was in his seventies and was the most successful farmer in the district. He had taught himself to read and write, had a house full of books on every subject under the sun, and could talk with, or debate with, the best on any subject. After spending many hours, days and years in his shadow, I knew that a man or woman does not need to be educated to be a genius.

Peer reviews have become a joke. However, if someone genuinely desires a peer review on the future of the climate, my suggestion would be to take a wander down to your nearest seaside pier and ask a crusty old fisherman what he thinks about the future climate. He will tell it the way it is, the way it could be tomorrow, and beyond that summer will follow winter and winter will follow summer the way it always has, and always will.

One pier review will be worth a thousand peer reviews every time.