Changing the Story

There was an odd topic of science brought up this week...which most folks won't see or grasp.  There was a meeting of the global warming enthusiasts down in Cancun, Mexico....so lots of global warming stuff came out in the media....some pieces to hide other pieces.  Having the meeting in Cancun likely helped in this matter because they have cheap booze and the reporters and participants could drink excessively and hope that neither really grasped what the other was saying.

For a long time, scientists have been thrilling us with this idea that global warming would melt the poles and we'd all be under another ten feet of water of additional water.  In effect, New York City would be under water....as New Orleans....part of Miami and parts of Washington DC even.

Strangely enough....some smart German scientists sat down and asked the magic question....would the fresh new water from melting poles be displaced evenly?  I had wondered about that question around ten years ago when all this worry came up in the first place.  Everyone was running around and talking about the entire globe being just one big glass and we'd all suffer.

Well....after a bunch of analysis and crunching numbers....it was determined that the Earth just isn't like a glass.  It's got curves.  So the folks on the northern part of the planet would have less water than anticipated, and the folks along Africa and South America would have more.  Then the smart guys got around to discussing the effect on the Gulf Stream to a small degree.....which would radically change weather patterns completely.  They were careful at that point not to say alot because there would have to be more model studies before dumping that part of the story.

The thing that amazes me is that for a decade....a bunch of environmentalists ran around with some simplified bit of science, but the truth was that they had never really crunched the numbers or understood what they were saying in the first place.  This is the negative part of global warming and why people have lost confidence.  It's like walking into a bar and being told that anything you drink will get you drunk but the bar tender doesn't really know if beer would be better than whiskey in keeping you sober.

The Bush Tax Cuts

I've waited a couple of weeks before commenting on the fury of the Bush Tax Cuts.....and what congress may or may not do.  I had to sit and ponder over this.

Simply the term "Bush Tax Cuts" are now legendary.  You could walk up to one hundred Americans....and eighty of them could comment on them.  Six folks would just say it's a issue of some type between the Republicans and Democrats.  Two folks would actually comment that the cuts come from Bush I instead of Bush II.

We could actually be sitting around in 2030, and folks would still be talking about enacting or curtailing or improving the Bush Tax Cuts.  One has to wonder if Thomas Jefferson had enacted the Jefferson Tax Cuts....if we'd be sitting around today....200 years later....debating if the Jefferson Tax Cuts should be tossed or permanently fixed.

Here's the deal.  If you had real tax reform going on, we wouldn't be discussing this.  When you have around 20k pages of tax code, it's a joke and miracle that things work as well as they do.

If some idiot stood up in the Senate and said we'd dump the tax code entirely and limit code to twenty pages....then we could toss the Bush Tax Cuts.  We could just bring up a plain flat tax with no credits for anyone....business or personal.  If you just said everyone would pay thirteen percent tax....then we'd likely have enough revenue to run the country.  But I doubt that anyone wants to make this real simple.

So in the end...we get the Bush Tax Cuts fixed up for another two years, in my humble opinion.  The Republicans look great, and the Democrats look at least happy that things worked out.  By the end of 2012, as the election closes out and party wins and another loses....we will face the Bush Tax Cuts yet again.  My guess is that we will push for another two-year grant, and then in 2014...another two-year grant.....over and over this will go.

Eventually, some idiot in Washington will ask that the Bush Tax Cuts be renamed....just to be different, and maybe then we might start thinking about this in a rational sense.

The Alien News

There was a brief announcement by NASA yesterday.  They've basically come to agree that you can find life even in the most toxic chemical....arsenic.

This means that you could go off to the most harsh environment dreamed up by any lab guy....and likely find bacteria still growing....and thus life....on any planet starts to become more than just a one percent chance.

For a highly religious guy, this is going to prove a challenge now to say the Earth is alone in terms of life forms.  The best you can take from a religious prospective is that God populated the universe, and that will keep folks still sitting in the pews and happy for the time being.

Somewhere out there....there's this green Martian guy named Charley....and he's grinning a bit while he chews on some arsenic.  Those Earth guys will eventually figure out the rest of the story....and be mighty surprised.