James Hansen has been adjusting the historic temperature records to produce a positive trend, so if you are citing NASA/GISS data, the conclusion is tainted. Our Central Ohio water/spring has been extraordinarily warm (as you well know), but Europe had record low temperatures during the same period.

I thought the carbon markets in Europe and the US had collapsed and that the exchanges had gone out of business. Is forestry a different kind of carbon market.

It is more economical to postulate that Obama is anti-American. He also has a Muslim sensibility stemming from his days in Indonesia. His decades in the pseudo-Christian churches like Wright's (he has found another in DC) are a diagnostic clue to his bigotries.

What kind of mental derangement makes an African-American despise a man of remarkable and real accomplishment like Cain and admire a total fraud like Obama? Could this explain much of the plight of African-Americans? A kind of mass delusion? By the way, CD got his facts backwards. American corporations are among the most highly taxed in the world, and plutocrats are in fact heavily taxed and provide most of America's tax revenues. Almost half of all American households (and a majority of African-American households) pay no federal income tax. If the federal budget is to be balanced, taxes on middle class and working class Americans will have to be increased substantially. --bob sykes

Of course, she's under some sort of fatwa and could be a bullet attractor any second. I, myself, might have second thoughts. --bob sykes

Forget the German, someone will speak English. My daughter went to grad school at the U. of Freiburg. Gorgeous Medieval city utterly untouched by WWI and WWII. Walk around and enjoy the city itself. Too bad you have to work. By the way, the train to Zurich is the fastest way to get their. Also, there's usually a big difference in airfares between Basel and Zurich.

Back in the 1980s, my wife and I went looking for a home computer. We had two requirements: (1) I needed to include equations in documents I used in my engineering classes; (2) my wife needed the European character set for her Spanish classes. At that time, the Mac was the only computer that could do either. No DOS or IBM clone could do either. So, we bought a fat Mac, and have stayed with Apple ever since. A few years later, DOS/PC systems had the same capability, but we were still writing BAT and SYS files, and had no GUI. The point is, that early on the Mac provided true functionality that was missing in other platforms and OS. I have a Window 7 machine on my other desk, but I am writing this on a Power Mac. Windows 7 still lacks the file management capability of Mac, although in other regards it's hard to tell the difference (except for the abominable IE). Unfortunately, over the years many of my favorite programs (SigmaPlot, FrameMaker, MathCad) abandoned the Mac, and most engineering programs never came aboard. Autodesk is an exception, but who has $2000 for a graphics package? So, I need both worlds, but I mostly work in Mac world. Bob Sykes (Your site always suppresses my name in favor of some stupid code. I think this only happens in TypePad.)

Two hundred million dollar F22s that sit uselessly in hangers are a liability not an advantage. How many F15Ss would that buy?

Slittyeye got it right. I "taught" engineering at the college and university level for 37 years. I slowly realized that what I was doing was providing structure and discipline via deadlines and grades. I never taught anyone anything. They learned stuff by themselves because of the discipline and structure.

I served on college and university faculties for 37 years under at 10 deans. Deans make a great deal of difference in how a college runs. Good ones are very rare. Only one of the 10 I knew was really good and effective. Most were interested only in the next job, and two or three were not interested in doing the work: Dean was just another merit badge, another check-box on the resume. A really good dean has to be honest and open, and has to energetically support the faculty in their efforts. Faculty are required to bring in external research dollars (lots and lots) and teach high-quality modern courses. This is hard, and an enthusiastic, supportive dean goes a long way. It is amazing what a few well-timed. atta-boy/girls can achieve. Georgia Tech is one of the great engineering schools in the US. I am glad to see they have gotten a good dean. --bob sykes

I've seen almost all of Washington's films, and I like all of them. I will surely watch this one. I'm not sure if he's channeling Mike Hammer or Phillip Marlowe, More the former, I guess. The New Testament eschews revenge, but the Old Testament embraces it. As Christianity disappears, something will replace it, hopefully Yahweh. Seal Team 6 fully understands Washington, and thank God they do. --bob sykes

Only if you have a gun and know how to use and are willing to use it to kill something/one. The real problem is likely to be animals: bears, pumas, coyotes, wolves, snakes, etc. Of course any human you see should be treated with extreme caution and suspicion. They can do whatever they like and help will never arrive. --bob sykes (your site continues to screw up my Google ID. No other site does this.

There is a great deal of information about guns on the survivalist blogs. Generally, pistols are a bad idea because it is very difficult to hold one without putting a finger on the trigger. The best general purpose weapon is a bolt action rifle. But that sort of assumes you're in a war zone and/or need meat. A 22 LR is the most useful in general, because you can scare people with it and hurt them if need be. If you're going to hunt game bigger than a rabbit, you'll need a bigger gun. Probably the best choice if you're not a gun expert is a double-barrelled shotgun in either 12 or 20 gauge. You can leave them loaded indefinitely (no sprng fatigue), and all you have to do is pull the trigger(s). Some of them have a trigger for each barrel. These will definitely scare people, and the ones you can't scare will be put down. You can also hunt with it. If you have kids (you do), any gun is a hazard, because kids search out their homes in detail and find everything. You could get a gun safe. I don't like kids and guns in the same house. Some gun blogs point out that if you are concerned about economic collapse and a zero-value dollar the best barter stuff is ammo. 22 LR is the best choice, but whatever gun stores usually stock is fine. Ammo is good because it can be broken down into small value units: one 22 per can of soup. Gold and silver are big value items and are hard to break down into soup cans. Also, gold sales are reported to the feds. Really, you should get out of LA. (Is that where you live?) Find a home in Amish country. Ohio is nice. In Amish country, you won't need a gun, and you could get work on a farm. So could your kids. If you come to Knox Co., I'd be happy to welcome you. --bob sykes

I read the book (and the Fountainhead) a number of years ago and enjoyed it, so I'll see the movie when it gets out in my part of the boondocks. Some stuff gets to DirectV before it hits our three "big" screens.

There is a fully constitutional process for eliminating the existing Constitution by amendment. On the other hand, it is notorious that the Convention that wrote the Constitution did so without authority. They were merely supposed to improve the Articles around the margins. However, that is legal quibling. The fact is the States accepted the proposed Constitution as a legitimate product of the Convention and proceeded to adopt it by election. So no Big Man with a Gun is needed, nor would anyone violate his oath if the amendment process were followed. Oaths would also be satisfied if another Constitution Convention were called as is provided in the current Constitution.

The problem is the federal government itself: a military coup does not solve that, it merely aggravates it. It is necessary to eliminate the federal government in toto. At a minimum, a return to the Articles of Confederation (cleaning the slavery thing) would be desirable, but reducing the USA to a customs union would be ideal. There would be no President to drag us into undeclared wars, no federal courts to overturn democratically made policies and laws or to meddle in local affairs and no overweening lawless federal bureaucrats. All spending/taxation decisions would devolve to the States. Undoubtedly, State taxes would increase as federal subsidies for education, roads, etc, etc would cease. There would also have to be some serious decisions regarding federal entitlements. But the Catholic theory of subsidiarity (pushing all decisions to the lowest practicable level) would be realized.

A Black jew like Jesus. Good grief! Anyway, I graduated from Northeastern in 1966. Then it was a route out of the working class and into the middle class. And it worked for me. I went from Dorchester to a faculty position in a major university. Nowadays, Northeastern has turned its back on the working class and focuses on middle class kids who are too stupid to get into the Ivies. Harvard, then as now, was thoroughly elitist. Everyone there is a member of the ruling class or soon will be. It is full of poseurs who claim to be oppressed or victims of this that or the other. Of course, they themselves are the oppressors. --bob sykes

No theologians? How about Gary Wills (often interesting) and Teilhard de Chardin (for a little mysticism). I would also add Jane Austin and Ernest Hemingway. yours, bob sykes

The Duke of Windsor playing golf in Bermuda during WWII.

A little biogeography lesson: Libyans, like all North Africans are genetically white, swarthy but white. The Moors of Shakespeare. Black Africans live south of the Sahara. There are, of course, some black Africans living in Libyan, but they are Gadhafi's hired mercenaries, and they are killing Libya's native whites.

Elimination of Somali piracy requires a military presence on the ground sufficient to suppress the various militias and pirates. This was tried once before, but we and our allies don't have the stomach for the level of violence needed. We don't even allow our military to use sufficient force to engage pirates caught in the act on the high seas. The truth is, the costs of piracy are still less than the costs of suppressing it. --sykes.1 (google is confused again)

The reality is that energy supplies are large and increasing, yes increasing. While cheap, easily recovered oil is declining, total oil reserves are not. Also oil is a minor (but economically dominant) fraction of total fossil fuel reserves. Natural gas, including gas hydrates, is by far the largest reserve, and coal is much more abundant than oil. All told there is probably a few hundred years supply at current consumption levels. Then, there is nuclear. While uranium reserves are the principal source of fuel for fission reactors now, there are larger thorium reserves. There are also breeder reactors. I discount fusion, solar and wind, which are examples of criminal fraud and not energy sources. In the very long run, the ice sheets come back and latitudes higher than about 30 N/S become uninhabitable. There is no such thing as long-term planning or sustainable activities: both concepts also belong in the trash heap of criminal fraud. --bob sykes

In a true doom scenario, there will be a huge population die-off, and surviving will have a large random element. The die-off is well-described in "One Second After," the scariest book I've ever read. But the survivorship as portrayed is romanticized. "Road Warrior" and "The Road" do it better. However, doom is unlikely in the extreme, so focus on your retirement. You should consider a small, rural midwestern town, say 10,000 to 20,000 people, somewhere from Ohio to Iowa. You will have cable TV (or at least satellite, which is better) and all the amenities within an hours drive. The local Krogers will carry any European beer/cheese you want and every Californian wine you ever heard of. The state-run/licensed liquor store knows all about single malt scotches. If you fall down and can't get up, the local hospital will life-flight you serious medicine. You will not have urban congestion or crime, and there are fewer rattlesnakes that far north. None where I live. Housing is cheap, so you will have a nice nest egg from the sale of your Californian hovel. You will have a much nicer house, too. And you can still annoy people with your blog.