Mag-Lev Fantasy

From a discussion on Engadget about the pros and cons of taxing cars for miles driven via GPS device, someone said this:

Perhaps you should have worked harder during school? A gas tax/road tax w/e you call it is a great idea. It will help fund Mass Transit and push hydrogen technology development. Hybrids and Electrics are just stop gaps, we need hydrogen! Also the money can be used to fund Mag-Lev trains and bullet trains which the rest of the world has! And america was supposed to be no. 1 right?

First, you've got to love how 'Mass Transit' is apparently now a proper noun. But anyway, to the crux of the argument. Environmentalists love to dream about the promise of hydrogen cars and mag-lev trains. Such methods of transit are clean and utopian and will not hurt Mother Gaia, plus they're unstable technologies so if one or both of them should happen to explode in a hydrogen-magnetic kablooey and take a few thousand planet-killing carbon-emitters with it, well that's not a bug, it's a feature.

I'm always amused at people who jump on the Mag-Lev train bandwagon. Mag Lev trains, by the way, are futuristic trains that levitate by opposing magnetic force, so they can go very fast as they have no friction. Anyway, my point is a train is a train whether it's propelled by gas, electricity, magnets, or Mr. Fusion. And no one rides trains. Raise your hand if you ride a train anywhere more than about once a year. Unless you replaced every car on earth with a train that would arrive to your location within about 20 seconds and could take you anywhere you wanted to go, including to your friend "Digby"'s house out in Tooele, trains are never going to replace cars. Ever. Ever ever ever.

Ever.

Come What Mays

Sweet. A Republican-who knew? As that link states, "As far as I'm concerned, this means our 2009 prospects are stronger than Mighty Putty and brighter than an Oxi-Cleaned laundry load."

Attempt #2

One of these days I'll get this right. Today is still not that day...

Had it with politics

Went w/ the Mrs to the temple tonight-there's really nothing better for making you come back to the day-to-day and gain some much-needed perspective. Provided you can still have a fighting chance of feeding your family, the world's just going to do its own thing as it marches steadily closer to oblivion, and you need to do your own thing.

That's what I say about the MSM. So many blogs I read complain constantly about the extreme liberal bias and corruption of the media. Tracking all the bias is a full time job for some places. I think it's ridiculous to complain. It's not as if any of them are going to change, and anyone with 1/10th of a brain can instantly see through all of it. Granted, the things that are very troublesome are the items the MSM refuses to report-you can't look through something for something that isn't there.

But here's where I say just vote with your eyeballs and read something else. The savvy among us know where to get actual unbiased, factual reporting, and it's not from the MSM. Seek out those media outlets and read them instead of the products from the AP & Reuters. You'll be far better informed and you'll be contributing to the demise of a lousy product.

And remember what James Taranto said in 2004-the MSM's liberal cocoon likely caused John Kerry's downfall. He thought the media would bury the Swift Boat Veterans and their message, but the Swifties got around the MSM and took their message directly to the voters so that, by the time Kerry got around to addressing anything, he looked like he had something to hide and the damage was already done.

Back to my point-not much in the world of politics can truly matter once you contemplate eternity and heaven and all the things that are so much bigger than us. It's easy (and sometimes fun) to get caught up in all the details but the only 'change' that's worth a dang is the kind you can do with your own life to make it about anyone other than yourself. So stop wasting your time waiting for a false messiah to 'change' everyone else so you get more 'free' money. Just change, period, and leave the world's problems to everyone else who fails to see things as they really are.

Yes, we have an obligation and duty to make the world a better place. So start with yourself-it's the only person you ever really have total control over. If even Neal A. Maxwell can compare the world of politics to rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic, I think it's OK to pretty much disengage from the entire scene.

And now, another picture of a unicorn.

Journey to the Really Obvious Special Effects

The next movie up from the weekend-the first that was not a musical-is the new Brendan Fraser remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth.

There's not much to say about this movie other than that it was 'pretty good.' A good family show with nothing particularly funny or interesting going on, but some unusual scenery and a decent amount of enjoyable adventure. We didn't see it with the 3-D glasses, which was a shame since almost the entire movie was designed to be watched with 3-D glasses. Lots of big and scary things fly at the screen...

In other news, I'm at least 2% improved on the mouse pen. And yes, it is MUCH harder to draw with one when you're used to drawing with a mouse for the last 5 years. To wit, here is my drawing of Brendan Fraser. Other than his face and basic body shape, doesn't this look exactly like him?

Congrats to the 'cuda

Congratulations to Sarah Palin on her first grandchild. It's unfortunate it wasn't under better circumstances, but Bristol deserves all the credit in the universe for keeping the kid and choosing to marry his father. Good on ya.

I promise I will try to get better as soon as possible at using the mouse pen so my pictures don't look like rejected characters from the back of Kix cereal boxes.