As laid out in
late May:
...As for how to bet:
It looks like we're going to have a second wave.
And perhaps Ruth Bader Ginsburg has to get deathly ill to mobilize the base.
And a market crash.
Hurricane season looks to be above average.
Maybe Iran is convinced it might help to shoot at something.
Since that was posted:
So here's a story from LitHub:
It had been exceptionally rainy during
the summer of 1938 in the Northeast, but Wednesday, September 21 was
shaping up to be a nice reprieve, starting out warm and mostly sunny,
promising to be a beautiful day. Despite the pleasing weather, however,
the news was full of storm clouds on the horizon. A little more than a
week earlier, announcers at CBS Radio had set the stage for the German
chancellor’s address to a Nazi rally in Nuremberg by telling their
listeners, “The entire civilized world is anxiously awaiting the speech
of Adolf Hitler, whose single word may plunge all of Europe into another
World War.”
In the ensuing days, the United States and the rest of the world got
healthy doses of Hitler’s vitriol and his ruthless determination to take
back the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia with three million
ethnic Germans that had been stripped from Austria by the Treaty of
Saint-Germain at the end of World War I. Readers of the New York Times
on September 21 were given page after page of unnerving reports and
commentary about Hitler’s aggressive stance and his ultimatum that
Czechoslovakia turn over the region, or else he would take it by force.
Czechoslovakia’s purported allies, France and England, were actively
debating whether to abandon their pledge to defend Czechoslovakia
against foreign aggression—in this case from Germany—and later that day
they did just that, siding with Hitler. This move paved the way for the
Munich Agreement on September 30, in which England and France
essentially gave the Sudetenland to Germany. Lauding the agreement,
English prime minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed that it had
achieved “peace for our time,” a naïve boast that proved to be grossly
untrue.
After wading through 26 pages of international and domestic news in the September 21 issue of the New York Times,
readers in New York and New England would have seen, nearly hidden in
the bottom left-hand corner of page 27, a short article on an
approaching hurricane, which had been born a few weeks earlier in
Africa. On September 4, a French weather observer at the Bilma oasis in
northeastern Niger noted a slight disturbance in the atmosphere, perhaps
as mundane as shifting winds or a thunderstorm. Although no one
realized it at the time, that disturbance became an easterly wave that
morphed into a Cape Verde–type hurricane, which marched across the
Atlantic, arousing the attention of meteorologist Grady Norton.
Norton had joined the US Weather Bureau in 1915. His early
assignments focused on general forecasting, but he switched to
hurricanes after an affecting encounter in late September 1928. On the
way to visiting relatives in Florida, he stopped to watch as men
shoveled dirt into a trench filled with the decomposing bodies of people
killed by the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane. He overheard a woman behind
him say, “There’s something wrong with them forecasters or Joe would
have got away in time.” Norton later recalled, “I took what that poor
woman said to heart, and I knew then and there that what I wanted to do
most in life was to prevent such senseless destruction.”
Norton got his big chance when he became
chief hurricane forecaster at the bureau’s Jacksonville office just a
few months before the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The tragic outcome of
that devastating storm, especially the great loss of life, only
increased his determination to improve forecasts. So when he heard via
radio on September 16, 1938, that a Brazilian steamer, the SS Alegrete,
had reported a very low barometric reading and hurricane-force winds
about 1,000 miles northeast of the Leeward Islands, Norton sprang into
action, focusing all his attention on the approaching storm....
....MORE
