The Left Wing Redneck

From 20 plus years spent as an uncivil servant, the Redneck would like to share what he learned about government and how it really works. The clowns  politicians who you vote for have little to nothing to do with the faceless bureaucrats  dedicated public servants who actually do government. One interaction between elected politicians and the public service that matters is the budget.  Every year politicians decide how much will be spent and what it will be spent for.  This determines how much the bur.. err dedicated public servants can do,  it doesn't change what they do, only whether they do it or not. Government money mostly comes from taxes in one form or another.  Nobody likes to pay taxes, the only reason we do, and that politicians are still marching around with their heads attached to their necks, their bodies uncoated with tar and feathers is because we the people get real or perceived benefits from government spending. ...

So you wanna know why electric cars are stupid?  Because all cars are stupid.  Electric cars will never be 'green'.  Being green is about not wasting resources and reducing impacts.  So how efficient is using a ton and half or more metal, plastic, exotic compounds made from rare elements, rain forest rubber etc. to move a few hundred pounds of flesh from here to there? Every time  a few tons get shoved around,   a few tons of energy are burned to make it go and a few more yet to make it stop.  Newton explained this in the 17th Century.  Was nobody paying attention?  It matters little where the energy comes from, sunshine, dead dinos, nuclear fusion, energy costs, the more you use the more it costs. Alternate energy vehicles will not stop urban sprawl or traffic jams.  One hundred years ago, the Model T, the first car built for everyman, meant freedom to go places.   But it turned out that the price of  mobile freed...

In a post last April the redneck ranted about   explained why political opinion polls may no longer be accurate.  Based strictly on my opinion, totally unbiased by research, data or methodology (known to be susceptible to errors and misinterpretation)  I am predicting the the polls are going to be spectacularly wrong in predicting the outcome of the November 2012 US presidential election.... like way more than a percent or three. For a combination of reasons, pollsters are no longer getting a representative sample of the population, mainly the growing number of people who no longer have a 'landline' phone, combined with privacy laws, call display and annoying telemarketers destroying telephoning for accurate information gathering. Lessee how prophetic this is, it is Sunday morning, November 4th, the Wall Street Journal is calling it a dead heat . Before the telephone pollsters used to go door to door.  That might be a problem today for so many reasons, at...