The Pnebleu Blog

This afternoon I was traveling around the world. One thing I noticed from San Francisco, USA to Perth, Australia to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were the suburbs. In each country they were plainly identifiable. Most certainly they had their differences, but they were overtly similar. Are the suburbs taking over the world?

I think they might be. Bill Vaughan said, “Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” The problem with suburbs is that they constantly grow larger and larger, instead of growing up, or down. If suburbs continue to grow we will eventually run out of land suitable for construction. But before that, we will run out of land where a person can be completely alone in the wilderness.

Don’t get me wrong, I love developments and futuristic fantasies, such as Coruscant, but I also love the isolation created by the vast expanses of nature without any human feature or touch. No roads, power lines, radio or cellphone towers; the flawless creation of God. If we don’t examine our urban sprawl and look to developing a smarter growth solution, it might be a very gray world with a few, small perfectly-pruned and watered patches of green.

A quick Google search and you’ll find many organizations and articles fighting urban sprawl and promoting smart developing methods, yet I live in the exurbs, at the moment, and the signs of growth are still building. Do you want the world to look like this picture on every piece of stable ground? What can you or I do to promote smart development plans? I don’t know, but we need to do something before it’s too late; before we are looking at trees in a museum.

I’m starting to feel more and more like we are living in a police state. Especially, with recent events in the news; like the Los Angeles protest gone bad. But, what starked this feeling in me, are the numerous law enforcement offices on the roads. City cops, state troopers, bike cops, county sheriffs, and unmarked police patrols are all on the highways and streets looking for anyone they can give a ticket. The few officers I know personally are nice, wonderful people, but the system and policy that is developing in law enforcement should be given look over.

Just the other day on Texas A&M University’s campus, I was walking to my car when two bike cops pulled over two women on bicycles. I don’t know what for or what happened, but they did ask for a driver’s license. From the looks of the students, they were headed to the Rec Center to workout, so they might not have their id. Before the pull-over, the officers on bikes where just standing around waiting for something to happen. I’m not saying that the girls got a ticket, but if that is what happened, the officers where on a stake-out. Do two women on bikes pose such a danger to society that two officers should spend their time watching people and bike move by? Couldn’t they be doing something else more productive or at a level that requires their skills, like say, investigating a robbery or assault that happen frequently on the North Gate side of campus? (North Gate is a strip of dance halls and bars, that have had a few assaults aimed at foreigners and minorities in the past couple of years.) I think that instead of focusing on alternative revenue gaining, the police force should be doing their job: enforcing criminal laws. Unfortunately, many of the laws are written to increase revenue instead of protect the public wellbeing. A shift in law-making and a review of current laws would need to occur to make a difference.

This morning on my drive to class, I saw an unmarked car that had pulled over what from all indications was a speeder. That is a complete contradiction of the goal of speed limit enforcement. By driving an unmarked vehicle, the police officer blends into traffic, allowing individuals to drive as they would. When he/she pulls over one speeder, the government will get the ticket revenue, but for the majority of the other cars on the highway will continue to drive at higher speeds. It’s like a wolf in sheep’s wool. However, when an officer is driving a patrol vehicle, it stands out and traffic slows to the appropriate speed. This accomplishes the goal of speed limits (“safer” driving conditions), but does not boost the government revenue. There is a conflict of interests when the law enforcement adds to the government wallet. The officials will be encouraged to “enforce” more and the legislature will be encouraged to write more laws to be enforced, and judges would be more likely to find cases in more the way of the government.

I’m not saying we live in a country that is corrupt, but to prevent corruption takes a vigilant populous. We need to be the moderators of our government, not the other way around.

I finally broke the chains from Norton Internet Security. I replaced it with NOD32 for anti-virus and Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall as the firewall. So far I like them a lot. They don’t hog the system half as much as Norton did and I haven’t had problems with them freezing or anything. Norton was bloatware and if I happened to get infected, it would have immediately been turned off by the virus. I don’t have to pay as much either. It’s $10 dollars cheap than Norton. I had been having quite a few problems with Norton freezing up my system and slowing down the shutdown for several minutes. The firewall was also and enormous pain with it’s constant “What do you want to do? Block, Allow, Block Always, Allow Always.” The Allow Always never worked anyway! It drove me crazy; I couldn’t get anything done. That’s all over. I’m free! Free at last!

The other day, Mamaw, Carrie and I went whale watching in Puget Sound. There were so many little islands out there. It was so gorgeous. The sky was so clear, we could see the Cascades, Mt. Baker, and a few others. It was so wonderful! The Pacific Ocean is so beautiful. I took photos in the Puget Sound on our whale watching trip. The sunset is so gorgeous. I’ve got two really good pictures of the orcas spyhopping. It was spectacular. They are available at my Flickr account and my Facebook account.

I am getting frustrated with the internet. At home I have dial-up and we get about 40.0 kbps. At work I have DSL at about 150 kbps. At Texas A&M I get about 1.1 Mbps. That’s a wide range. Why can’t the U.S. have universal high-speed internet, at a minimum of 300 kbps. That would be really good. Higher speeds could also be purchased but that would be a good minimum. I’m so adjusted to broadband when I get home that I can’t even use dial-up. I get so impatient. There are so many things that I can’t do with dial-up. Make internet a utility and universalize it!

I like variety and a change in environment. I have not been able to easily find widescreen desktop images, but just recently I found two websites that have a lot of really good ones. The first is mandolux.com. The archive goes back to 2002 and I really like a lot of the large desktops. The artist/photographer is very talented. Another widescreen desktop site I found was InterfaceLIFT.com. It was arranged in an easy to browser and download fashion. I get quite bored with the same desktop and visual style after a while. It was nice to find sites that understood the widescreen audience. Variety is the spice of life.

Everybody is talking about the price of gas right now. It’s the hot button issue, so I’m going to weigh in. Supply and demand affect the price of gas and not price gouging or any other radical idea. The only way the price will lower is if there is more supply or less demand, and I don’t see demand dropping much. So the only thing our government could do to help the situation is to reduce the regulations on drilling.

Everyone talks about becoming energy independent. Well, it’s not going to happen if oil companies aren’t allowed to drill off the East, West, and Gulf Coasts and/or Alaska. We also need more refineries.

Taking more taxes from the oil companies recent profits is not going to help the situation nor would it be good precedent in our country. Private business is a cornerstone in functioning society. If gas becomes socialized bad things will happen. Most socialized programs fail miserably.

U.S. Congress, do not even consider taxing the oil companies to get their profits or even think about socializing gas!

One fun, radical idea to fix our oil problem is to invade Canada! We’d get more cold weather croplands, more timber, more oil & natural gas, and only a little more than 30 million people. California has about 36 million. The U.S. would double in physical size. Canada has lots of fossil fuel opportunities. It would be a great economic boost. They don’t have much of a military. They can still have their provinces, but will now become states.

A less radical plan would be to slowly start buy their land right out from under them. Then, the landowners would be American and they could force the parliaments to join the Union.

All we have to do next is move south. Western Hemisphere domination!