Too proud...

Too proud...  One of our cats is way too proud of his accomplishments this morning!  Those fragments used to be a single paper towel...

Polar bear vortex...

Polar bear vortex...  ScrappleFace:

“Within just a few years,” Holdren said, “you’ll be able to walk from Philadelphia to Dallas on the backs of polar bears…that is, if you haven’t already been slain by a ravening famished pack of them.”

Hah!

Just in case...

Just in case... one of my readers is amongst the 5 people on the planet who haven't already seen this Proctor & Gamble ad, here it is for you.  I recommend having some tissues at hand...

Walmart 1, ObamaCare 0...

Walmart 1, ObamaCare 0...  But the progressives aren't going to let anything like facts get in their way of destroying my country.  Nope, they wouldn't do that...

Speechless, I am...

Speechless, I am...  Debbie is stunned and incredulous.  Both of us are wondering what genes we're missing.  Just about every day, I learn that my ignorance of the human condition is even more profound than I had previously thought...

The good old days...

The good old days...  They weren't really so good.  I'm with Lenore Skenazy (WSJ$) on this (I remember well how boring the backs of those cereal boxes were!).  I'll take our online world over the alleged “good old days” of libraries and book stores.  In the pre-Internet era, I spent a lot of time in musty libraries and browsing in book stores.  While there are a few aspects I miss about them, the key word there is “few” – the advantages of instant information availability on today's web, and of electronic book readers (the iPad is my current preferred platform) completely overwhelms any nostalgia I feel for the old days.  To reinforce that, all I need do is remember how much I hated the always screwed-up, always out-of-date card indexes in technical libraries.  Nope, I don't want to go back there...

Duty...

Duty.  Robert Gates' memoir is all over the news now.  An English take is here, the Wall Street Journal's here.  A paragraph from the WSJ piece sums up my own feelings on it nicely:

The Gates book may be most troubling for what it says about the three long years left in Mr. Obama's second term—which also makes us wonder why he didn't go public sooner, at the time he left office. He describes a President who knows he must invoke the traditional rhetorical markers of U.S. foreign policy—a strong defense, credibility with allies, democracy and human rights—yet whose every impulse is to leave the world to its own devices. That's especially dangerous when the American public is in an inward-looking mood. The U.S. needs a President willing to make the case for continued American engagement and leadership.

November 2016 can't come fast enough...

Flow battery advance...

Flow battery advance...  This is the general sort of technology I think is most likely to solve the grid storage problem, at least in the near term.  Here's more on flow batteries, if they're new to you...

When it's really cold outside...

When it's really cold outside...  Now that we're planning on moving out of California, to somewhere much colder, we're paying a lot more attention to things like this.

We're going to be visiting northern Utah in a few weeks to get some first-hand experience with this...

I've been waiting for this...

I've been waiting for this...  The inimitable Mark Steyn on the global warming “scientists” stuck in the Antarctic ice over Christmas.  Here's a tiny sample from the beginning of his piece:

... you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it.

Don't miss the rest of it!

About that “polar vortex”...

About that “polar vortex”...  The lamestream media, mindlessly repeating the talking points of the warmists, would have you believe that global warming caused the polar vortex that slammed most of the U.S. last week.  Other scientists, apparently not slurping from the warmist funding teats, say “Not so fast!” – as polar vortices have been around for quite a long time.  For instance, historians are pretty sure that the notoriously cold winter of 1777, in which George Washington and the Revolutionary Army huddled up in Valley Forge, was caused by a polar vortex quite similar to last week's.  Unless my memory is even worse than I thought, I'm pretty sure there were no gas hog SUVs, coal-fired electrical plants, or 747s in 1777.  As one of my favorite Englishmen (James Delingpole) puts it:

... without polar vortices, America might look a very different country today, possibly with many times more CCTV cameras, much poorer dental care, and with cricket as its national summer sport instead of baseball.

But the warmists place far more credence on their computer models than on those pesky facts...