My political compass:
Discarded. With the stench coming from Washington D.C., my nose is enough. (ca. 2005)

The sack of fluids and solids typing this responds to 'Ken Howells' and hovers (often literally) around San Bernardino, CA, USA.
A interweb mail box in the domain kenvective.com with said sack's (not max) first name 'exists.'

Lately, reading this relieves stress.

At http://www.kenvective.com/e2/maxClimb_zenTheme_screenshot_firefox_kde.jpg there's screenshot of my Zen theme (maxClimb_zenTheme) in action. My theme uses background images loaded from one of my websites, so it may not work properly for others, depending on browser security settings. On MSIE, Cream of the Cool gets put below Cool User Picks instead of between it and the right-side nodelet column. If I change the CSS so it places CotC properly in MSIE, then it's wrong in Firefox. I use Firefox on linux/KDE primarily anyway, so I'm not bothered too much by the problem.

They changed to using a bunch of span tags in 'New Writeups' and it buggered the oval-background-colors look that I had there; I've altered my Zen CSS to make it readable, but haven't actually FIXED it yet (March, 08).

5-14-07 -- icicle says An interesting note about The Long Emergency -- while Kunstler is not a street-corner Cassandra or profiteer, he has been notably (and embarrassingly) wrong in times past. At least according to Wikipedia. Kunstler was a pretty vocal Y2K chicken little (and has countered subsequent criticism with the strange conspiratorial logic that the government spent billions of dollars fixing the bug, "in secret") who also projected a 4000-point drop in the dow in 2006. Oops. None of which directly discredits the assertions in The Long Emergency, but it does make you wonder.

3/1/2008 - very late:
<C-Dawg> Has the world reached Peak Penguins? Defend your answer.
<maxClimb> Penguin Extraction is at predicted historical peaks. Continued growth in extraction rates depends on grass-roots adoption of penguin-replenishment practices.
<C-Dawg> That's a pretty darn good sentence for diction practice.