It's Getting Scary Out There...

I hate to read the news these days. It is almost as bad as during 9/11. "Gloom, Doom, and Rumors of Boom" to quote Pogo.
Things are getting tense again, and expensive again. I don't see it getting any better this time. The speculators have priced us into a corner gas-wise, and our country's love affair with automobiles at the expense of all other transportation (not to mention community planning for CONVENIENCE) is going to cost us all big time.
My only consolation when filling up my 12 gallon tank once every three to four weeks is seeing the SUV drivers stopping at that gas station more than once a week on average to fill those land barges they call "cars". I am VERY glad I am not buying THEIR gasoline. (If I were, they'd be riding scooters!)
I sometimes wonder why oil producing countries can't have grown ups for leaders instead of adolescent boys with something to prove. The Saudis seem to be pretty mature about things, but then, they run the world, so why would they rock the boat? I guess all those guys like being able to turn the whole industrialized world inside out just by saying "BOO!" to their neighbors.
I do wish things would just settle down and let us all de-stress a bit. The real reason so much of America is overweight, and why so many in some parts of the country smoke, is because of the stress of living in this world today. It is absolutely crazy.
Then again, if you can ignore the craziness (hard to when everything costs so freakin' much and your pay isn't going up any time soon) things aren't SO bad. We have had a pretty resilient economy in this country historically. I just hope this current "readjustment" isn't as big as the one that hit in 1929. It took World War II to get our economy out of that one.

We seriously need to develop an alternative to fossil fuels, and we need it yesterday. Just think how the balance of power in the world would shift if we didn't need to buy oil from anywhere? We could leave the Middle East in peace, and just say, work it out among yourselves. Everybody has to live together, this planet isn't getting any bigger. We could watch people like Dick Cheney end up poor. That might be a good education for them (Heck, we should force all our government officials to live on the base pay of a military NCO. THAT would teach them the meaning of budgeting wisely.) (Better yet, the average salary of an elementary school teacher. That would make them feel ashamed of what our priorities have been in this country.)

It would be especially nice if this new energy source were renewable, but would still need the kinds of expertise that is used in the current industry, so that we could just roll those jobs over to the new system. That way nobody gets hosed too badly in an economic way.
Some of the proposed energy solutions for cars make me nervous. Hydrogen fuel cells, for instance. Hello!? The SUN is a big ball of highly compressed, constantly exploding hydrogen. They use hydrogen in ROCKETS. It is dangerous stuff. (So is gasoline, but it is less BOOM! making, really, than hydrogen cells have the potential to be.) The way people around here drive, yelling at their kids, eating their dinner, and jabbering away on their cell phone at the same time, we'd have some pretty seriously deadly accidents unless they come up with a REALLY good way to isolate that fuel cell and keep it intact.
Me, I think I'll just go crawl in bed and pull the covers up over my head!