in bureaucratic hell

I've just spent two and a half hours on the phone with Medicare representatives, trying to straighten out a problem with my late mother's claims.  That's on top of the hour I spent yesterday on the same thing.

Am I ready to disavow my liberal faith in government and let the lean and mean private sector take over our business?  Absolutely not, and here's why.

1) Most of these people were actually trying to be helpful, even if they didn't know anything, and went beyond the call of duty in trying to get me information.  Especially the last one, who was in the wrong department, but who listened when I explained that hers was the only department I could reach, and who really went the extra mile by contacting the right department (unreachable by outside phone) and getting a definitive answer, and chatting agreeably as we waited.

2) These departments that I was communicating with were those of a private contractor, not the government in the strict sense.  And I reached them because I was given the number by a volunteer assistance program whose representatives also took a little extra effort to help.

3) All around, it was far less frustrating than the oceans of time I spent waiting on hold and being shuttled back and forth to the same numbers that had previously been unable to help me, and being assured that something was done when it was not done, and being told I should have asked the previous person to do something they'd told me they could not do, that I had trying to set up AT&T internet service a few years ago.  In this case today, when I reported that someone else could not help me, I was listened to, and something else was tried.

Winston Churchill once said (quoting an old proverb, or so he claimed) that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others.  So I can say that government bureaucracies are the worst bureaucracies in the world, except for all the corporate ones.

another thing I don't understand

It's a common factoid that the actual temperature rises of the earth have leveled off in the last couple of decades.  Here's a climate scientist site discussing and explaining why that doesn't negate global warming. Here's a news report claiming that scientists are trying to hide the fact. Here's a skeptic who ain't buying the explanations.

Yet I am also reading regular reports that the earth's temperature is continuing to rise and set new records.  A new one came in today.  Here's the graph. Here's the news story.

So what's the story here?  The natural variability in a general rise, as is the usual explanation, can't be the whole story, because according to these other stories the temperature is rising.  Is it that one is measuring sea temperatures, the other atmospheric temperatures, or something else?  Is the lack of temperature rise purely a statistical sleight of hand trick?  (I've seen this argued, but not always.)  Look at the random jumps in the last graph.  See that particularly outstanding high around 1997?  Notice that, until the latest data point, none of the successive ones is higher than that, even though the trend is still up?  You could say the temperature hasn't gotten higher since 1997, though you'd be criminally misleading by saying so.  Is that all it is, though?