don’t panic

For the last half decade, it’s been pretty easy to hate President Bush from an environmental point of view. Few people have done more to hurt or cared less about the planet as a whole in all of history. Oh, he makes his grand speeches and solemn words, but it’s always been a front for his dealings with big oil and a determination that the U.S. should always be economically superior, even at the expense of the rest of the world. But this is old news.

What bothers me is his more recent “stance” on energy. Ever since the State of the Union address, he’s been gung-ho about renewable energy and being “green”. And he’s making a really big show of it. He snagged a headline from the paper on the very day of his speech regarding Switch Grass. Id like to think that the president is better informed about things like that than the rest of us, but I seriously doubt it.

And then there’s his tax credits for hybrid cars and his sudden interest in solar technologies. It all sounds good, but I have to ask myself what’s really going on here? I have the distinct feeling that I’m just being told what I want to hear and that it’s all just a song and dance.

I saw an article today on CNN about how the previously cut budget at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado was magically restored just days before the President is scheduled to visit.

I can see two possibilities with this scenario. The first is that he’s been completely clueless since he took office and someone whacked him upside the head and he’s finally seen the light. OR, it’s just another pony show so he can stand up in front of the media and say, “Look at me! I’m Green!”

Idiot or actor… Idiot or actor… Hmmm. I’m not sure which is worse. I guess if he’s just an idiot there’s always the slight chance that someone smarter than he is might just feed him something helpful.

But if it’s just a show, which I suspect is more the truth, then Bush will most likely go down in history as the man who could have made a difference for the Earth, but was too busy playing politics.

One of the things that has always given me a warm fuzzy feeling inside is that Apple refuses (so far at least) to put out multiple versions of it’s OS so that users can “upgrade” to include more “features”. The coming Windows OS, Vista, will ship in, count ‘em, eight different flavors. The sad thing is that the first three in the list are crippled so badly as to be mostly a joke.

Apple does have a “Server” version, but it’s configured for, well… servers.

One of these days, one of the geniuses at Microsoft is going to figure out that instead of giving the public “options” to reduce price, they are just confusing and ticking them off when they buy a product that doesn’t do half of what they need/want it to and then have to shell out even more cash just so they can view video, which they could do before they upgraded, and for free.

Macs are a bit more expensive, but then you will rarely find a Mac owner with buyer’s remorse.