McCain, Bush and Hundreds of Lemmings Change Position in Offshore Drilling, Thank God

"The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day..."

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in The Hat

It's just damned frustrating to realize that America could easily be oil and energy independent today. We could easily be free of the influence and control of the Saudis, Iran, and Sean Penn's close personal friend Hugo Chavez.

The only THINGS that have prevented energy independence are Thing One and Thing Two, aka the Republican and Democrat Parties.

Thing One and Thing Two have long preferred demagoguery to actually serving the American Public. I hope you all have followed the antics of Thing One and Thing Two over the last eight years. Never Compromise. Always stake out opposite sides of all Energy issues. Never Compromise. Never actually pass any legislation. Blame the other Thing for the stalemate.

Steps needed for lower energy prices and energy independence have already been thoroughly outlined. Expand drilling in the United States, including off shore and in what is perhaps the single most environmentally safe area in the nation, the Arctic refuge (ANWR).

Increase Automobile Fuel Standards. Provide Tax Support for development of Alternative Energy Sources.

Clear the road for increased Nuclear Power. It's simply stunning that Iran is smarter than the United States. Hell, let's let Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad run the US Nuclear Energy Program. At least he actually believes in energy independence. O.K., that's a joke, but you get the idea.

End the incredibly stupid tariffs on Brazilian sugar based ethanol imports. Brazil, in case you hadn't noticed, is our friend.

In short, implement all the good energy policies from both Thing One and Thing Two.

John McCain, President Bush, most Republicans and many, many Democrats did prove they can read the POLLS today and suddenly switched sides to support off shore drilling. Good for them.

But can we actually get Thing One and Thing Two to compromise and pass legislation?

Well, remember The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss? Thing One and Thing Two only created a mess. It took the children (i.e., the American Public) to actually clean up the mess.

A "tip o' the Wizard's pointy cap" to Senator Harry Reid, who first used Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat to illustrate the log jam in the US Congress (courtesy of Wikipedia).

Mother Nature Strikes Back!

Mother Nature has a new invention. And, as brilliant and creative as man might think he is, he doesn't hold a candle to the infinite abilities of the Goddess of Creation herself.

I know this will sound like science fiction. It's not. However, the Grayson Wray track you can listen to on the Amazon Widget to the right will sound exactly like Science Fiction. And, if you purchase the mp3 from Amazon the Wizard will actually make a little cash. He is going to need it to do battle with Mother Nature soon. Why?

The Rasberry Crazy Ants are headed this way and they are attacking computers, video games and even vehicles in their paths.

You heard right. Ants that damage computers! And Cars! And the damned things are tiny. About the size of fleas. They've been dubbed Rasberry Crazy Ants after the exterminator who first did battle with the invaders (Tom Rasberry) and their swarming "crazy" behavior.

Worse yet, they are virtually impossible to kill. They ignore the ant bait used by most exterminators and they ignore fire ant killer, too. Nests have multiple queens. You simply can't kill them all.

If there is any good news, they also kill fire ants.

They are omnivores and attack plants, insects and eggs. But they are attracted to electronic devices. Tom Rasberry told Techworld "I think they go into everything and they don't follow any kind of structured line. If you open a computer, you would find a cluster of ants on the motherboard and all over. You'd get 3,000 or 4,000 ants inside and they create arcs. They'll wipe out any computer."

The little ants are currently found in five counties around Houston, Texas. They have established a beach head in the Johnson Space Center. While NASA officials say they have the problem under control, they admit they cannot eliminate the colonies.

It is likely they will spread nationwide over the next few years.

Additional news articles: KOCO TV5 News, Associated Press Report

A Possible Replacement for Waterboarding

Actually, water boarding is still permitted (for now) since President Bush vetoed the bill that would have outlawed the practice.

But we can be confident that both McCain or Obama will sign such legislation in the future, so we might need a new, tested and proven method to gain information.

Could "Rick Rolling" end up being the ultimate weapon?

Recommended Reading

My wife did something very "retro" recently. She joined the public library.

In the 1950's , when I was a mere lad back in Pueblo, Colorado, every school aged child had a library card. Because, unless you were very, very rich, the library was where books came from!!

Back in 2001 I boldly predicted that the Internet would ultimately change all that. I believed that Congress, or perhaps even the publishers themselves, would overcome the enormous complications created by copyright laws and all books would be availble on-line for an affordable fee. Sadly, I wasn't quite correct in my predictions....... at least not yet.

Consider for a moment the magnitude of the opportunity to serve mankind.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with nearly 119 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include some 18 million books.

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume each of those 18 million books has 250 pages.

Now my wife is a voracious reader. She can read 100 pages in a book in one evening. But even reading at this torrid pace, she could only read 11,680 books in her lifetime. And that's if she read for 100 pages a day for 80 years. Not a likely scenario.

But if she did, that's only 6/10ths of 1% of the books only in just the Library of Congress. And The Library of Congress itself only contains a small portion of the writings world wide.

In other words, we don't have a prayer of ever scratching the surface of human knowledge and creativity.

And of course a substantial portion of human creativity has already been lost. Books go out of print and fade into the dustbin of history. Which brings me to the point of this essay.

Paul Crume was one of the most talented and insightful writers and essayists who ever lived. His column appeared on the front page of The Dallas Morning News from 1948 until his death in 1975. And selected essays have been collected into two books, now both long out of print.

My wife and I have been rereading The World of Paul Crume, because we are lucky enough to actually own a copy. This book, published back in 1980 won't be found in any library outside of Dallas, and probably not even there. As of this writing a few old and well worn copies of the book are available on Amazon but I can't promise you any will still be there when you click the link.

Sometime in the mid 90's Marion Crume (Paul's wife) or another relative set up a Paul Crume Website on Geocities. But even by 2001 the website had fallen into disrepair. Links were broken or missing. Nothing remains today.

Small snatches of a very few of Paul's essays used to be available at this site. My guess is that even for Paul's wife there were copyright or other legal hassles that prevented a larger portion of the books to be reprinted.

And here is where our society and government must allow and even force change. Every essay Paul ever wrote should be archived on-line. It would be easy and very inexpensive to do this. For a small fee (or perhaps advertising support) Every person in the world would be able to read his writings, be warmed by his wit, be touched by his love.

Millions and millions of similar, perhaps even greater works are held back from humanity out of greed, ignorance or simple stupidity. Today lawyers and "creative rights managers" in this country will withhold creative works from the Internet and let them disappear rather than allow one person to read the work for "free."

Every day this week Paul Crume has made my world a better place in which to live. We need for it to be possible for you to have the same experience. At the click of a button.

excerpt from the essay SCIENCE CAN'T KEEP UP by Paul Crume* .....people know a great many things that science has not yet discovered. Science will eventually get around to discovering them and making them official, but meanwhile they work just as well while they're undiscovered. It was several millennia after people had begun to use a good stout sapling to pry rocks with that science discovered the lever, and Archimedes announced that with a proper lever and a fulcrum to put it on he could move the world. This is an "iffy" scientific attitude. Science discovered the wedge and the wheel after people had been using them for years. This inability of science to keep up with people is called a cultural lag. It has only been 300 years since Issac Newton discovered that an apple, if it becomes detached from the tree, falls to the ground, though we may reasonably suppose that generations of apple-knockers had known this all along. True, Newton did figure out why the apple falls, a discovery of very little utility if you know ahead of time that it is going to fall. * from the book The World of Paul Crume, edited by Marion Crume, copyright 1980 Marion Crume, SMU Press.

Here's hoping that science (or maybe the lawyers) will soon discover the Internet is a good way to both store and distribute the knowledge, wit and wisdom of mankind to all of mankind.

People have been knowing this for years, as Paul Crume might have said.

Microhooey!!

Thinking about Microsoft's proposed buyout of Yahoo.....

I've written previously about past tragic buyouts in the computer and Internet industry. In fact I'm hard pressed to think of even one acquisition that has served users, employees, stockholders or the industry well.

Innovation is inevitably killed in workforce reductions and assimilations. For some reason failed managers are placed in charge of the brilliant developers and marketeers that the acquiring parent had hoped to exploit. Of course the founders and top managers of the acquired companies usually take the money and run.

Creativity dies a slow and torturous death.

One of the worst examples I've previously cited was the purchase of MusicMatch (the mp3 music jukebox company) by Yahoo themselves. MusicMatch had created one of the most user friendly, platform friendly, and trouble free programs ever created. They had been rewarded with customer loyalty, industry awards and a rapidly growing market share.

Yahoo was struggling with a poorly written, buggy program rightfully ignored by most music afficionados and computer users. So, in 2004, Yahoo acquired MusicMatch for $160 million dollars. Makes sense, right?

Wrong. In a few short years they destroyed MusicMatch making it's successor program Yahoo Music one of the worst, buggiest, non-working programs in history. Yahoo's corporate bureaucracy at first ignored MusicMatch's programmers that they micro managed the innovation to death. Here's just one of thousands of blog and magazine articles on the debacle from WIRED MAGAZINE. Here's another one.

Everybody lost. Yahoo's investment was wasted. Users lost a great program. Employees lost their jobs, And innovation was smothered to death.

Yahoo has repeated this program dozens of times. If they've had a "successful" acquisition, I'm not aware of it.

In fact, Yahoo has so consistently wasted their resources that they have squandered their industry leading position and their mammoth stock price (and corporate value) so that Microsoft can acquire them for a mere song (pardon the pun), a tiny fraction of the value of the company just a few years ago.

But nobody has destroyed more companies and stifled more innovation than Microsoft. While 41 BILLION DOLLARS looks like a bargain today, when Microsoft's rigid bureaucracy chews up and spits out Yahoo, don't expect a dime's worth of value to be left.

The technology blogosphere is almost universally opposed to this acquisition. A great place to start reading is Farhad Manjoo's series of articles over at Salon.com.