DisSuggs4u

My friend Charles asked a very good question in response to my previous post:

So how/where/with whom do we discuss and/or do something about this?

I did not respond to him right away because I was struggling with trying to squeeze my response into the comments area.  Eventually, I decided that it should live in its own post.  So, here goes… (Continued)

This morning, I wrapped up** a very good book — The Assault on Reason by Al Gore. In it, President Elect Mr. Gore discusses his opinions and viewpoints on various topics from the media, to the climate, to technology, all of which are woven together throughout the book into the common thread of democracy and how the lack of reason within our government in recent history — as well as a shift in the way Americans receive and process information — has become a threat to the overall democratic process.

(Continued)

Uh, wow. I have never seen the data laid out like this before, but from the looks of this graphic, the US uses more gasoline per capita than a bunch of other nations… combined. One can only imagine how much worse it has gotten today, four years after the data in the graphic was gathered.

I am sure that graphics like this make Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria — the top five importers of oil into the US — very happy because it means more money for them.

Of course, I bet they all wish we were paying them in a currency other than US Dollars, which just hit a new all time low on currency exchanges.

Tons o’ fun.

So, after months of working its way through the judicial system, the case “U.S. vs. I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby” (pdf) has come to a dramatic close after 43 stepped in and commuted Mr. Libby’s 30-month prison sentence because he, the President, thought it was “excessive.” As you can imagine, this made major headlines.

Hooray! Justice prevails!

(Continued)

Interesting. Today, I was able to log in to my AIM account again, which I had been an issue I was dealing with. So, it appears that the monkeys at AOL have removed the curse caused by associating an XDrive account with and AIM account.

This pleases me.

Am I so pleased that I will continue to use XDrive or recommend it to friends? No. (Continued)

This completely made my day. The climate crisis does not stand a chance once The Tap cranks their amps up to eleven and rocks the CO2 right out of the sky.

(Of course, one could argue that Spinal Tap is a partial contributor to the warming of the atmosphere. After all, there must be some effect from all of those drummers spontaneously combusting.)

Even the biggest elephant never forgets — And the sun never sweats. No, the sun never sweats…

Awesome.

So, a little over a week ago, I went prowling the interwebs for an online storage service which would make it easy to share large files with friends/family. My search led me to a couple of candidates and from them I chose XDrive.

Since I am an AOL Instant Messanger (AIM) user, I thought this would be a great fit. So, I signed up for an account and then proceeded to upload files for testing. Everything was going great… or so I thought. (Continued)

So, all of the talk from US news outlets and water coolers is revolving around the shootings that occurred on the campus of Virginia Tech yesterday. Over thirty people were killed when some nutjob with a pistol decided to chain a campus building shut and then off a bunch of their fellow students and teachers before feeding himself a lead salad.

All of the reactions to this event I have seen or heard have been similar to:

• “Can you believe it?”
• “This is just horrible. How can a thing like this happen?”
• “I am in complete shock. What a tragedy.”

Truth be told, it is sad and unfortunate that this occurred. And I truly feel for the family and friends of the victims of this heinous act. It will take a very long time for their psychological wounds to heal, if the ever do.

I, however, am not all that phased about this — primarily because I tend to look upon things of this nature with more of a holistic perspective. (Continued)

I am a big fan of keeping it simple whenever possible.  This is not because I am lazy.  Instead it is based on my experience that the more complicated you make things, the more opportunities there are for things to go wrong.  Very wrong.

In that spirit, rather than my going on and on about some of my current feelings, I will simply point you to this post by Dilbert creator Scott Adams.  For those of you not familiar with Adams’ writing, there is usually a very thin line between truth and satire.

I will leave it up to you to figure out where the line is drawn.

It looks as though there may be hope for the framer’s vision after all, as this recent Supreme Court ruling will hopefully balance out the Administration’s “check” on environmental policy.  Hopefully, this will force the hand of big business — from “The Detroit Three” to chemical plants and refineries from coast to coast — to do something innovative when it comes to the way they (and we) impact the environment.

Something with a whole lot more impact and better thought out than E85 — which does not even effectively solve the problem.

As for that whole argument that stricter environmental standards being bad for business… I think that is a bunch of horsefeathers.  What ever happened to the American “can do” spirit???

I have more to say on this matter, but that will have to wait for another post.