Global Warming doesn't always mean warmer

I know that the term global warming makes it sound like we are all going to warm up, but in fact this climate change doesn't always mean warmer, it just means more extreme. It's probably why it took an extra 2 days to get from Boston to Central Oregon for my holiday break, snow and ice on both coasts.

These extremes are coming at a time when cities and counties are already strapped for cash and the inability to clean up after these storms means only more federal aide requests. It's a cycle this global warming/climate change thing, and as much as our soon to be previous leaders wanted to believe it wouldn't affect their country, they were wrong... and now, we pay...

I hope we learned from the lessons of the past and learn not to turn a blind eye when very smart people come to the table with really difficult news, we should listen. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be talked about or researched more. With the new administration I hope there will be a pile of money available to help with the research and possible innovation that might have prevented the continual increase in greenhouse gasses. And maybe that pile of money will also help local governments when they can't help after some of this extreme weather reeks havoc across the country.

How ironic would it be if the bailout went unaccounted for

I was at the gym yesterday and I was watching CNBC or something like that and they were talking about how they contacted all the banks that got more than $2m from the bailout money and asked where it went. The guy at the bank basically said, they lent some, they kept some and that no one had told them to keep track of it. I find it highly entertaining and even more highly disturbing that with all the talk about how de-regulation was the cause of all these problems in the first place, it seems to me that the first thing that should have happened when we started handing out some of our hard earned tax dollars was that we actually learned from our mistakes and asked where it was going... doesn't look like that happened.

This is why making a hasty decision like the bailout wasn't and isn't right. If those banks were so far in the hole that they were going to go out of business in less than a month then they deserved to go out of business and we would be better off without them. But, I am guessing that most of them could have figured out a few ways to un-burden themselves long enough to give the Congress, House of Reps and even our President a month to figure out a constructive way to help them out, that might not have cost the tax payers as much, only to have no account as to where things are...

I struggle with my need as an American to get everything the minute that I need it. That's why so many people have made so much money on fad diet pills and, pyramid schemes in this country, because even though history tells us different, we want to believe that it's just that easy.

And if there's one thing that I've learned unless you are a billion dollar bank who begs the government for money and cries wolf the minute the interest rates drop, it's not that easy...

40 year old mouse?

Today is the 40th anniversary of the computer mouse. I would venture to say that 20 years ago upper middle class people had regular access to computers, 10 years ago I sat in my college dorm room and logged onto the internet via AOL. Today I store all my docs on google docs, I use facebook to keep in touch with friends, I do all my shopping online and spend more time emailing than I do on the phone.

I don't know about you, but I am a little scared but very excited about the next 40 years.

The status of our environment in 1961 via Steinbeck

Being unemployed, I am getting through some of the books that have been on my shelf for quite sometime and am uncovering things I never knew I would find. Last night for instance I started Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. One passage I found quite insightful about the status of American consumption and what it does to the earth comes within the first 30 pages of the book.

"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash- all of them- surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index...I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness-chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in sea."

Steinbeck wrote this book in 1961 and even then he knew what we were destined to become. I believe that we are probably better at hiding our trash, but it doesn't mean it's not there and it's not doing the same damage it was doing 40 years ago.