Top December Posts

We finished our first blogging year strong at Along the Gradyent despite blogging lite the last 9 days during our sojourn to Texas. Thanks to each and every reader for your time and attention and good will. Our top ten December posts by viewership were as follows.

1. We didn't know it at the time, but we started our home business by correcting mistake. In We Were a Third Party Amazon Seller we reminisced on our time riding the yard and estate sale circuit to buy inventory for our on-line resale business. The Washington DC metro area, with the country's highest median incomes, was a great place to build our inventory because government employee, contractor and lobbyist denizens were constantly buying nice things and then turning them over to clear space for the next. We bought furnishings, clothing, golf clubs, board games, video tapes, books, CD's, DVD's and most anything else we thought we could profit from.
2. In the 1970's climatologists tied to global cooling virtually everything that is linked to global warming today. Our Climate Change 1972 Style post noted that global starvation was the scare tactic back then, much like rising sea levels and disappearing polar ice caps are the scare tactic today. Too bad we were blogging lite when that expedition of global warming "scientists" got caught up in the Antarctic ice pack.
3. Breaking up the Wall Street brokerage cartel in the deregulation push of the 1970's and 80's was fantastic for individual savers and investors. Getting government out of the middle, as noted in Breaking up Cartels: Benefiting Individual Investors, dramatically reduced prices, spurred competition and improved access. We are waiting for the masses to figure out that Obamacare's supply side creates a massive, iron-fisted, government enforced cartel. Good luck to all.
4. Below zero air masses in arctic systems are so heavy that they can result in a temperature inversion. We described and documented the phenomenon in Arctic Air Is Different. It was -2°F at the top of the Gallitan range and -13°F 2,600 feet down at the base of the Bridger Bowl Ski area. As I draft this highlight post on 1/4/2014 at 5:00 pm the more typical pattern of temperature falling with increased elevations prevails with a reading of 3°F atop the mountain compared to 14°F at the base. You can check out the current readings here. 
5. In Global Warming: Spitting in the Wind we reported that the "father of climatology" said "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide." It turns out I went to college with his students, most prominently Bill Steffen, a fellow Evans Scholar and debunker of global warming panics. For 39 years he has been a TV weather forecaster in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He publishes an informative blog.
6. Our friends at American Thinker provided an around the Christmas Tree discussion guide for roping in your adult children to buy Obamacare. Someone needs to subsidize the Baby Boomers. Check it out at Health Insurance Roasting Over Open Fires.
7. In Staring at the Black Line we recounted a brush with Olympic fame.
8. Hallelujah Food Court Flash Mob linked to the now classic flash mob performance.
9. Friday Watercolors featured the talents of our talented sixth grader.
10. The budget deal added to the debt bomb and kicked its resolution down the road leaving Coal in Our Offspring's Stocking.

Happy 2014 everyone and good luck to all.