Frankenstein Award to the U.S. Navy for building small "killer" boats called Autonomous Surface Craft that use artificial intelligence to locate and destroy their targets. I mean, what could go wrong, this is the U.S. Navy, right? The same one that rammed two high-tech guided missile destroyers into a huge oil tanker and a giant container ship this past summer, killing a score of sailors. A guided missile cruiser collided with a South Korean fishing boat, and the guided missile cruiser Antietam ran aground in Yokosuka Harbor in Japan. The Navy also kind of lost track of an aircraft carrier battle group in the Indian Ocean.
So, not to worry.
The Ostrich Award to The Trump administration for first disbanding the federal advisory National Climate Assessment group and then sending speakers representing Peabody Energy, a coal company; NuScale Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquid natural gas group to represent the U.S. at the international climate talks in Germany. Barry K. Worthington, executive director of the U.S. Energy Assn., said he was going to challenge the idea fossil fuel should be phased out. "If I can throw myself on the hand grenade to help people realize that, I'm willing to do it."
It was a puzzling analogy.
In the meantime, 2016 was the hottest year on record, breaking records set in 2014 and 2015. Temperatures were particularly high in Asia and the arctic, and drought was widespread in southern Africa. Wildfires burned 8.9 million acres in western Canada and the U.S. And a patch of warm water off the coast of Alaska facilitated the growth of toxic algae that killed thousands of seabirds and shut down fishing industries.
The Doom's Day Award to what the Financial Times calls the "uber-rich" who are "hedging against the collapse of the capitalist system" by buying up land in New Zealand. "About 40 percent of our clients are Americans," says Matt Finnigan of Sotheby's International Realty New Zealand. The buyers want land that comes "with their own water supply, power sources and ability to grow food."
But you don't have to go down under to bunker down. Vivos Group will sell you a hardened concrete bunker in South Dakota for $25,000 and a yearly fee of $1,000. Or you can buy a cabin on the World, a huge cruise liner that will take you far from trouble. If you are Larry Ellison, you can buy 98 percent of Lanai, one of Hawaiian Islands.
In Memory of Edward Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," who died Nov. 11 at age 92. The book was what author and journalist Matt Taibbi called "a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers." Herman wrote almost 20 books on political economy and corporate power, including his 1997 "The Global Media" with Robert McChesney.
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