Currently there is no fiscally responsible party in U.S. politics. There’s plenty of interest in playing the game, check out this neat little press release from Nancy Pelosi just a couple of years ago hammering President Bush for his unbalanced budget.

The glimmer of hope in all of this is for this tea party movement to grow enough to create a third party (not something I expect) or to be a significant enough voice that the current players have to pay attention.

A small thought for the ADD generation…

Even if you’re getting a tax break now, or benefiting from a stimulus package, take another look at this chart.


Sound familiar?

Absolute proof the experts don’t know what they are talking about.

I had the distinct pleasure of riding around in a 1980 Citation that belonged to a friend. I’m not particularly a car guy, but I do oh so remember that one. The memory mostly involves the need to not have anything that could possibly spill in a position to spill when the driver was using the clutch (think drinks poured down the front of your shirt). Many shouts of “you’re doing that on purpose!” were uttered before we finally came to the realization that, um, no. It was the car. I’m sure I would have enjoyed it even more had I known at the time it was an award winning car…

Admittedly I’ve got nothing, but you can cruise over to So Last Year and get a chuckle.  or two.

Seems the planet isn’t exactly getting warmer.

Maybe it’s relevant maybe it isn’t. Mostly I think it’s not simply because it’s too short of a time frame to really be worth discussing.

From Realclimate , check out the graph, use it to impress your friends.

The first point to make (and indeed the first point we always make) is that the climate system has enormous amounts of variability on day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year and decade-to-decade periods.

I admit to being pretty much a skeptic to all of this. I’m that way with just about anything that involves some version of the sky falling…mostly because the sky rarely falls. I also think there is a bit of a modeling problem in that mother nature hasn’t provided a complete list of the relevant variables. I searched for a reference and couldn’t find it before I lost interest, but it involved a recent warming trend due to solar irradiation and a current cooling trend with a decrease in that radiation. Once that returns to “normal”, we’ll see temperatures starting to increase again with a rise in greenhouse gas. I mention that because I’ve seen it used to explain rising temperatures, but rarely used to explain falling ones, and I think many global warming skeptics are guilty of dancing around the topic. And it is after all, a completely separate issue from CO2 warming.

No matter what you think about all of this, RealClimate has this part right:

…the question should be, are there analyses that will be made over the next few years that will improve the evaluation of climate models? There the answer is likely to be yes. There will be better estimates of long term trends in precipitation, cloudiness, winds, storm intensity, ice thickness, glacial retreat, ocean warming etc. We have expectations of what those trends should be, but in many cases the ‘noise’ is still too large for those metrics to be a useful constraint. As time goes on, the noise in ever-longer trends diminishes, and what gets revealed then will determine how well we understand what’s happening.

but duct tape is silver…

or if you prefer duck tape, although that conjures up an entirely new train of thought…

This computer=good reviews, and Best Buy’s version has some pretty good ones as well.

So I thought to myself, I shall buy one. After finishing that thought, and a healthy pause to make sure that it was finished, I get in my very own car, and drive to the nearest Best Buy only to be told that yes, it is a very good computer but they don’t have any. After checking the fancy Best Buy inventory computer, I learn there isn’t one at any store in the Dallas Fort Worth area. But at least it’s a good computer, it’s not like I wasted a trip or anything only to return home without a crappy computer. No I came home without a very good computer.

Feeling quite proud of my ability to select a high quality computer, I ponder my options.

A nicer computer would be better, I’m fuzzy on a lot of things but in general I understand that better is better so I decide to just buy the fancier version from the website. Expected shipping date in a week. I order it, only to find out in the rarely used Gateway Calendar one week is actually 21 days. It is however negotiable so we negotiate. I spend some more money but Gateway promises their new calendar has special 10 day weeks just for me.

I become enamored with the really helpful order status page they have. So useful. I use it.

It never changes, remaining committed to the original 21 day week. When I call the helpful help line, they tell me not to worry, they have a different calendar they are using for my order and they will stick to the agreed 10 day week (just for me, don’t tell anyone or everyone will want 10 day weeks). So not only am I brilliant, I qualify for special treatment.

Yesterday, the day before the delivery date, I call and inquire as to what is really going on since I no longer am confident in my ability to interpret the Gateway Calendar as displayed on the order status page. The helpful person answering the help line phone informs me that yes, everything is as scheduled and my computer should ship to arrive here today.

Sweet.

We apologize for being unable to ship your items as planned. We expect to ship your items by 04/03/2008

Gateway via Email

Best Buy still doesn’t have any computers either. I’m not exactly sure what it is that Gateway is trying to do here since it obviously doesn’t involve actually providing any computers for purchase. Perhaps this is merely a plan to revise the calendar to some sort of 30 day cycle, thereby reducing the number of weekends.

Order cancelled, I want my weekends back.  Guess I’ll get in my very own car and take a trip to Fry’s.

Me?  I think I’m going with Leaping Volkswagen…

I gave up on trying to fix the previously mentioned problems, so I saved the one and only post I felt worthwhile, scrapped the data base, created a new one, installed a new copy of wordpress in a new directory, and have begun to post in run on sentences, I think it’s a worthy effort…