Month: July 2008

The iPhone is great!

The iPhone is great!

I own a first generation iPhone. While I have considered buying a new 3G version, I really don’t know why I should spend more money. I am very happy with the speed of my present phone as it does email and newsfeeds plenty fast.

The really great thing about the new operating system of the phone is the cool apps that are starting to come out. For instance, it has a FREE WordPress management tool and I am using it to write this column.

I will write more about my iPhone in the coming days. Subscribe to my feed to follow the discussion.

Immediate drop of oil prices

Immediate drop of oil prices

In my opinion the best way to quickly drop the price of crude oil is to announce that the US is going to build 30 nuclear reactors in the next decade.

This would send a strong message to the world community that we are serious about energy independence. One of the big perils with electric cars is the lack of availability of infrastructure to charge them.

We need to stabilize the world energy market and this would show everyone that we see serious about getting our house in order.

I know that John McCain has advocated a similar suggestion but I haven’t heard anything of this from Obama.

RANT! The Brickyard 400 race of 2008 was a joke!

RANT! The Brickyard 400 race of 2008 was a joke!

In case you don’t know, the Brickyard 400 race in Indianapolis, Indiana had severe tire problems for all of the cars. The management instituted “competitive yellow flags” that allowed all of the drivers to pit their cars and get new rubber.  While the cause of this fiasco appears to be multi-faceted, the solution that NASCAR management put in place was terrible.  I am not going to blame the Speedway or Goodyear (although they both should have worked to prevent this problem), I am going to blame NASCAR and the drivers for not dealing with it.

The goal of a race is to win the race by a combination of skill, mechanical design, and luck. Would the tires of the cars shredded if the cars were going around the track at 150 mph? My guess is that they would have been fine.  So rather than forcing a series of 10 lap sprints (essentially what the result was) these highly skilled drivers should have just slowed down and won the race by perseverance.  The drivers that drove too fast would have wrecked or ran out of tires.  The drivers that played it safe with a steady effort that responded to the conditions of the day would have won the race.

You can vote for who you think caused the fiasco here.

NASCAR MANAGEMENT: FIX THE PROBLEMS AT THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY BUT ABOVE ALL ELSE – STAY OUT OF THE WAY DURING THE RACE!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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Expanding the format of posts on this site

Expanding the format of posts on this site

Traditionally, the posts on this site have been formatted with RANT! in the title and the content has included me yelling (all caps) that something needs to get fixed.  I will still do these types of posts in the future but I want to expand the scope a little and will now just have my random thoughts on a variety of topics.  The rants will continue as needed and you can find them in the RANTS category.

RANT! Obama should use public money

RANT! Obama should use public money

I am amazed that this is not being made a bigger issue.  I guess Obama is paying everyone off with his millions of dollars so that they don’t talk about his millions of dollars.

Obama promised that if he was nominated, he would use public money for his campaign.  Now he is backing out of that promise and is going to forgo those restrictions so that he can outspend John McCain by what some think will be 5 to 1.

Obama will run the richest campaign ever for the office of the US President!

While I have a hard time saying that people can’t give money to their favorite candidate, I do have problems with massive amounts of money being used to “buy” the campaign.  Never before has the disparity between candidates been so massive.  John McCain will only have 84M from the government to spend on the election and Barack Obama will be able to spend as much as he can raise and estimates say that could be 300-400M!

BARACK OBAMA – YOU NEED TO HONOR YOUR PROMISE TO USE PUBLIC FUNDS! DON’T BE A TYPICAL POLITICIAN AND CHANGE YOUR OPINION WHENEVER IT IS CONVENIENT!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Left Right and Center is named incorrectly

RANT! Left Right and Center is named incorrectly

I regularly listen to KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” on my iPod. While I enjoy the intelligent discussion I think they should rename the program to “Left, Very Left, Ultra Left, and Pretty Far Right”. The show now has a blog so I think it is fair to chastise them a little and condemn them for not being as open as they claim that they are – if they disagree they can say so on their blog.

Tony Blankley does an excellent job of holding down the right. His opinions are typically well thought out and his intellect does a decent job in offsetting the radical left. My biggest complaint is that he always seems to have predicted everything and wrote about it months ago and it is amazing that us mortals have only just now got to where he has been for a long time. It appears that, in his opinion, if we were just smart enough to read his column every week we wouldn’t have any problems in the world.

Arianna Huffington is on so infrequently it is a joke. She used to be on the right when Bill Clinton was the President but now that we have George W. Bush, she has decided to be on the left. She does fine representing the left when she bothers to participate but she is out promoting her books or getting interviewed by the rich and famous so much that she is rarely there. When she is there it seems like she is sending emails on her Blackberry when someone else is talking.  She supposedly represents the “progressive blogosphere” (whatever that means) but this doesn’t make sense since Bob heads up TruthDig.com so they really don’t need both Arianna and Bob.

Robert Scheer is so ultra left that he is embarrassing and just saying he is on the left is insulting most of his true positions – they are farther left than just left. I assume the only reason he is on the show is that he is old, can’t find someone else to employ him and he needs the money. To him all of the ills of the world were caused by the Iraq war, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. He will go to great lengths to find some obscure way to link every bad thing to one, both or all three of them. He is so out of touch with mainstream America that he even supported Dennis Kucinich for President!  Bob lives up to his left title though in insisting that all taxes are good and all money should be taken from everybody and given back to those that the government thinks should deserve it.

Matt Miller is supposed to be the center and he is the moderator.  Occasionally, he is out doing something else and then we get to hear a real center as the fill in is almost almost always a true centrist.  How does someone that worked for President Clinton and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress call himself a centrist?  He is not as far left as Bob and Arianna so I guess that gives the producers the freedom to call him center.  He must be right of the producers!

All of them do a very good job of promoting their books.  I don’t have a big problem with that but it is obvious that they see this show as a way to sell more titles.

As much as I deride their non-balanced viewpoints, the show is actually quite good.  The three of them (when Arianna shows up) try desperately to outwit Tony and, for the most part, fail miserably.  They bring up weak ideas and Tony points out that they don’t have all of the facts.  Tony usually does the show from Washington DC and I have this feeling that he is laughing at them when he is off microphone.

KCRW MANAGEMENT – FIRE 2 OF THE LEFTISTS ON THIS SHOW AND GET SOMEONE TO BE A TRUE CENTER!  FAILING THAT, CHANGE THE NAME OF THE SHOW!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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