My obligation

It seems that with all the flooding in Wisconsin and Iowa and the fact that I'm closely connected to both places AND have a MS in Water Resources Management I should feel obligated to say something about them, right? Right. Well, here goes...

I cringe every time I hear the flooding called a "natural disaster" because I don't really think it is. I'm glad others agree. I figured shortly after the flooding started to go down the media would start to pick up on this, and they did. I even prompted my father in law (a newspaper editor in an Iowa Mississippi River town) to look into this a few days back, with an emphasis on the climate change angle. I guess he got "scooped" by the WaPo...

Sure, some of the flooding is due to lots of heavy rains. But I think that the man-made changes - land use and climate change - play a significant role, and it's the land use decisions, especially the decision to build in flood plains, that drive up the cost of the devastation. Should my tax dollars fund the clean up effort in communities that have made poor decisions? Well, a heck of a lot more of my tax dollars are funding another poor decision - the Iraq war - so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Where do you stand?

Are you more like Gandhi, Stalin, George Bush or Milton Friedman? There's all sorts of questionnaires out there to find out where on the political/economic spectrum you are but I found this to be far better than most. Check it out here and then compare your results to mine.

Green greens

Some evidence points to interest in golf waning. I've played golf once and found it enjoyable enough, but wouldn't make playing it a habit. With the US Open being played in the desert this weekend this post seems apropos today.

Speaking of green, all the rain around here is making things really green. And pretty soon as all the nitrogen from farm fields in the midwest makes it to the Gulf of Mexico, that's going to be looking pretty green, too.

Has it really been that long?

Okay, posting two posts in a row, separated by months, that both apologize for not posting in a while is hardly a good way to win a fan base. My June 10th resolution, however, is to post on a daily basis for a while.

What will I post about? I don't know. Probably just some links to interesting things I read.

To start out I'll hype Mother Jones' recent issue on our nation's energy woes. I particularly like this article on the myths of energy independence. I don't think there's a politician out there willing to actually speak the truth about the impossibility of energy independence. (Reading this article is like reading the Cliff's Notes to a book I read recently called Gusher of Lies by Robert Bryce.) While MoJo is certainly left-leaning in their content, they aren't afraid to piss off the lefties either, and I enjoy that... a lot... just like I enjoy John McCain's willingness to stick it to the right on many issues.