for us old folks. I’m used to the paradigm of a cd player, multi-disk even. Playlists are fine for putting together music from disparate sources that I’ll want to listen to more than once, but most of the time there’s one or two cd’s, maybe even one or two songs, that I’d like to listen to, and that’s all. I don’t want to hear the rest of my collection, and I don’t want to have to run to the computer to stop iTunes when it starts playing something I don’t want to hear.

I also don’t want to make a playlist for each cd I have just to be able to hear it. I’ve got a lot of cd’s. Why can’t there just be a box/button/spot where I can just drag a few cd’s or songs to and then that’s all I’ll hear. Still have all the shuffle/repeat/etc features on that box that you get normally. The ‘list’ generated by the box would be temporary, there could be an ‘eject’ button to clear it, or have it automatically clear when iTunes is closed. The playlist interface as it stands now is a cluttered mess. I hate cluttered messes.

I want some way to listen to the music I want to listen to right now, without having to think too much about it. Right now it’s easer for me to use a cd player to do this than iTunes, even when I’m working at my computer, and that just doesn’t seem right.

My wife sent me a link to a presidential candidate matching quiz* and, while I have a number of issues with the quiz itself, one question in particular seemed to really get my hackles in a rise.

“Energy: Do you support federal assistance for the production of ethanol and/or biofuel as an alternative to oil?”

My “No” answer seems to put me at odds with all of the Dem’s and a few of the Republicans, which is no surprise. Biofuels are being touted as “green” fuels and a way to “rid us of our dependence on foreign oil”. So the candidates that want to appear progressive come out in favor of spending research money on biofuels while the conservatives think they should oppose it. Both sides playing their roles as expected.

But the real questions have only sporadically been asked in the media, and they are certainly not going to show up in any poll or quiz:

1. Should we be looking at biofuels as a way to solve our perceived energy problem?
2. Do we really even have an energy problem?

To answer the first I’ll ask you to think of this question: Should we be using agrible land to feed us, or our machines? While it may not seem like a problem now, switching to biofuels will most likely create another, even larger, crisis in a few short decades. Imagine what will happen when the biofuels start selling for five or ten dollars a gallon. Do you really think the farmers are going to plant food crops when they could make ten times the amount on biofuel crops, especially when you consider that most “farmers” now days are actually large corporations with stockholders to pacify? Then what happens to the food supply, or more importantly the cost of foods, when the majority of the earths agrible land is devoted to switchgrass?

Won’t ever happen you say? Then why can’t we just ditch the internal combustion engine, the oil heaters, the oil-fired power plants, now and be done with it. No more reliance on foreign oil. No more polluting the air, ground and water looking for and using petroleum-based energy. No need for biofuels at all because they would have nothing to power.

We can’t make that switch now because the real problem isn’t a shortage of energy, it’s a shortage of ingenuity, an overabundance of laziness and selfishness and a complete lack of the innovative spirit that created the foundations of our modern world. The oil companies and their stockholders want to keep the stranglehold on the economy they have now, selling out the future of humanity for their own short-term profits. The politicians are too afraid to challenge the status quo because they are afraid that they won’t get elected. The media won’t say anything that someone else hasn’t already said because that’s the safe thing for them to do. We want our four-thousand pound, four-hundred horsepower, environment and human killing machines, never mind the the state of the world we leave to our children and grandchildren. And the auto makers are only too happy to keep us supplied with what they say we really want.

It’s far past the time that we should ditch our short-sighted and selfish attitudes and do what’s right for ourselves and for the future of the human race. Spending research money on biofuel production only maintains the status quo. It does nothing for the advancement of humanity and could possibly cause more long-term harm than the good we get from the short-term warm fuzzy of “going green”.

We need to be spending research money on finding ways to produce clean, safe energy that doesn’t involve the burning of carbon-based fuels in any form, not on dead-end ideas that can only come to more harm than good. Come on folks. Let’s put our heads together and come up with a real alternative to petroleum-based energy. I know we can do it. It won’t be easy or fun but it will be the right thing to do.

*A much better quiz is the MPR quiz that this quiz claims to be based on. It’s still not perfect, but at least I didn’t feel like I was being guided towards the outcome that the WQAD folks seemed to feel I should have.

Blogs are an interesting phenomenon for those of us who matured before the advent of the World Wide Web. On the one hand it seems that they are great ways of getting your opinion out there to share with the world. On the other hand, to me at least, it can be like talking to someone who really enjoys talking about themselves, or at least loves the sound of their own voice, *and* likes to hog the conversation. Sometimes they can be funny. Sometimes they are entertaining. Sometimes they can get you to thinking in ways you never did before and sometimes they can be boring as hell. Hopefully this blog will be a good mix of the first three with very little of the latter.