SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

GOOD NEWS – FROM FOX:   Exxon Mobil (XOM) will spend $20 billion by 2022 to expand its footprint along the U.S. Gulf Coast, creating more than 45,000 jobs.  The world’s largest publicly traded oil company said Monday it will invest in refining and chemical-manufacturing projects at 11 proposed and existing sites, located in Texas and Louisiana. Speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Exxon's new CEO Darren Woods noted that 35,000 temporary construction jobs will be needed. The investments will also create 12,000 permanent jobs.  Many of the new positions will be for high-skilled, high-paying jobs with an average salary of about $100,000 a year, Woods said in Exxon’s announcement.   It was immediately claimed, of course, that this was all planned during the Obama administration, but I've heard that story zillions of times.  Jimmy Carter claimed that Ronald Reagan's defense buildup actually started under the Carter administration.  A failed mayor of New York, defeated for re-election by Rudy Giuliani, claimed that he actually started Giuliani's successful crime-fighting program.  Recall the old saying, roughly translated as "Victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan."

I'M A BIT CONFUSED – FROM THE GUARDIAN:   For thousands of years, parts of northwest Europe have enjoyed a climate about 5C warmer than many other regions on the same latitude. But new scientific analysis suggests that that could change much sooner and much faster than thought possible.  Climatologists who have looked again at the possibility of major climate change in and around the Atlantic Ocean, a persistent puzzle to researchers, now say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly, within the space of a decade, before the end of this century.  That is a much starker prospect than even the worst-case scientific scenario proposed so far, which does not see the Atlantic ocean current shutdown happening for several hundred years at least.  A scenario even more drastic (but fortunately fictional) was the subject of the 2004 US movie The Day After Tomorrow, which portrayed the disruption of the North Atlantic’s circulation leading to global cooling and a new Ice Age.  Wait a sec.  Didn't I hear something about "global warming"?  I thought I did.  Please inform me.

ESPN SINKING – FROM THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:  Faced with the combined pressure of declining advertising revenue and a steady loss of subscribers, ESPN will undergo another round of “significant” layoffs over the next four months.    Sources confirm a report by Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch that ESPN will target its on-air talent in this latest round of cuts, which will spare behind-the-scenes staff but include many hosts and reporters whom fans know and recognize.  ESPN is still working on the exact details of the cuts, which aim to remove tens of millions of dollars of salary from the network’s payroll. In addition to the layoffs, ESPN reportedly will buy out the contracts of some well-known hosts, something the network has largely avoided in previous cuts.  Why doesn't someone say what everyone knows?  A major reason for ESPN's loss of "subscribers" is that it's become a highly politicized left-wing operation that has turned off large numbers of viewers.  Get back to basics and you might survive, guys.

March 6,  2017