Energy Policy and ANWR Oil

With the newfound Republican majority in the Senate, President Bush's new energy policy will focus on a contentious issue: drilling oil in Alaska's ANWR wildlife reserve. The theory: there's 11 billion barrels of oil out in there. We can then extract the oil. The realistic argument: There's lots and lots of wildlife that has already been disturbed by previous drilling. Plus, we'd need to build a new pipeline for the oil anyway. But the pipelines aren't an issue. There's support for $20 billion for that. For $20 billion, the US could build two ITER's for itself! I suppose the prospect of environmentally safe fusion power isn't worth funding on a reasonable level. After all, fusion would last humanity the rest of its existence, while oil can last us (depending on who you ask) 50-150 years.

The Wonders of Electronic Voting and Ohio

Well, now that Kerry has conceded the race, the AP (and CNN) have reported that electronic voting machines gave Bush thousands of extra votes.

Granted, this has only ben proven in one county. Who's to say that it didn't happen elsewhere? It's not like there's a voter-verifiable paper trail or anything like that. This is just another story that really gets to me -- electronic voting is a Bad Idea in its current implementation.

When the computer scientists and electrical engineers building the voting machines are giving them a thumbs up (and better yet, the software that they're running is open source, for interested persons to inspect), THEN I'll consider the prospect of e-voting.

Bush Wins 2nd Term

I, like millions of other Americans, have stared at the newspapers and television reports with disbelief at the state of the Presidential election.

When we see the Supreme Court stacked with conservatives willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, privitization of Social Security, polluters continuing to write our environmental protection laws, science committee members disappearing from Presidential teams because the facts they advocated ran counter to Administration policy, it's not because I supported it! No, sir -- I can proudly say that I opposed all of these things Nov. 2.

How bad to things need to get before the average American will actually open their eyes to the world? Do we need to write discrimination into the Constitution? ("All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," to quote Orwell.) Maybe with an _informed_ electorate things would have been different. But our crappy schools don't produce (on average) citizens of the world -- or even of the US.

I'm sad. Sad for the state of the Nation, sad for the state of science in the country, and sad for the millions of people in the middle class that are continuing to be stomped on by the Good Ole' Boys in Washington.

At least MN and WI both made the right choices...