Well, it’s finally that time of year, and once again XM Radio has converted some of their channels to holiday music. The channels are mostly, if not entirely made up of Christmas music, except for one channel which will play Hanukkah music during the eight days of Hanukkah.

This year’s lineup is as follows:

103 - Holly - Contemporary Holiday Hits
104 - Holiday Traditions - Traditional Holiday Hits
105 - Music City Holiday - Country Holiday Hits
106 - Classical Christmas - Classical Carols
107 - Special Xmas - Novelty Holiday Fun
108 - Radio Hanukkah - Hanukkah Music

The only one I don’t listen to is 105, the country channel. I very much enjoy the other ones, despite being a strong atheist.

I am putting forth the idea that I might be more of a cowboy than Bush. I have never cut brush like the president has, I have never worn a cowboy hat, and I most certainly do not speak with a Texas drawl. However, I have done one thing that I believe Bush has never done. I herded cows this morning.

For sure it was a small herd of only around twenty that I had to round up, and I had help my landlord who was recovering from surgery. But I did lead cows with feed, “push” them into pastures, and come close in my mind to being trampled by those two-ton beasts. I came within inches of their huge hooves, their large snotty mouths, and their pies that they leave everywhere. My hands are chapped from the cold wind, I have blisters from holding a feed pail, and my pants stink of hay.

When do you think W last had to avoid being trampled by cows?

While running some errands today, I had to stop at Best Buy. I knew the Nintendo Wii was coming out tomorrow, but didn’t really expect to see anything. However, I did see people camping out waiting to buy it tomorrow:

I have to admit, the Wii looks cool. It’s at a good price point, the games are priced nice, and it has the most innovative controller out there. In Madden 07, you have actually make a throwing motion to throw the ball. Crazy.

A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”

– Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams, who is one of my favorite authors, was also a “radical atheist,” and used a lot of his writings to poke fun at the idiocy of religion. The following quote is one of his better ones, and certainly very relevant in today’s world:

Religion (…) has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘Fine, I respect that’. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking ‘Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?’ but I wouldn’t have thought ‘Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics’ when I was making the other points. I just think ‘Fine, we have different opinions’. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.

It’s rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that’s grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise—that’s a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think ‘Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity’, what does it mean? Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that’s holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we’ve just got used to doing so? There’s no other reason at all, it’s just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it’s very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

–Douglas Adams September 1998

With the New York Giants losing last night, no Guns n’ Roses album in sight, and Bush threatening the feeling of bipartisanship in Washington less than week after the Republicans were swept out of office, I have only one thing to day:

Today is a Replacements Monday. I’ll be putting on the best of the Replacements as I hack away at code today, only interrupted by the incessant meetings management loves to do on a Monday.

For those who want to know, the best three Replacements albums are: “Tim”, “Pleased to Meet Me”, and “Let It Be.” You can’t go wrong with those three.

With the Democrats taking power in Congress, one issue sure to be on their agenda is a coming up with an energy policy that moves us away from fossil fuels. Currently, for the fiscal 2007 year, the United States is slated to spend $770 million dollars on research for renewable energy sources. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me for such an important problem, and that’s probably because the Republicans have only paid lip service to actually doing anything about our energy problems. However, don’t think the Democrats will change much either. They haven’t put a price tag on any plan yet. The one thing both Republicans and Democrats have in common, though, is that they both think only they can solve the problem. Them, the elected officials, the conceited anointed.

Let’s take a different approach. I found the website http://www.greentagsusa.org which allows one to calculate their own energy usage and buy “green energy”. The money goes towards building new clean energy supplies as well as new research. According to the website, the average American household uses 10,388 kWh of electricity per year. To offset this, it would cost $200.00 in “Green Tags” a year to even out the energy usage, or just $16.67 a month. There are currently around 110,000,000 households in this country. That means if everyone “greened” out their energy usage at only $16.67 a month, 22 billion dollars a year would go directly into building and researching green energy.

I don’t believe that we would ever get all 110,000,000 million people on board with this, but it would only take 3.8M households to equal what the current president is spending. We do need an energy plan, but don’t think it needs to come from government. We the people can do a lot ourselves.

I did my part and voted yesterday. In the past, I have been lax with voting, especially for mid-term elections, but I think this recent election proves that every election counts. Unlike our democratic friends in Europe, our government can change every two years. Even though I don’t support either major party, have big problems with the new congressional ruling party, and aren’t thrilled with 99% of our elected officials, even I have to admit, that the system worked. Americans were unhappy, and they “threw the bums out.”

On the local level, I was much happier with the results. The Kansas school board is now in control by members who actually understand science. Phil Kline, one of the most despicable people I have ever seen in office, was blown out in his bid to be re-elected attorney general of Kansas by Paul Morrison. The other races, while important, didn’t seem quite as important as the races for attorney general and school board.

The Democrats will now control the House of Representatives, and barring any surprises, the Senate too. What this means for Bush, is that he is effectively neutered. There are some economic policies of Bush that I support, such as eliminating the estate tax, social security reform, and lower taxes in general, but those are either never going to happen or are in danger of being repealed. There also many policies of Bush I abhor, such as the NSA wiretapping plan as it is currently implemented, the elimination of habeas corpus, and anything related to religion. I won’t even get into the long list of Democratic Party policies I’m against.

Instead, I’m proposing the “Four Point Plan to Gain Shane P. Brady’s Respect”™. This is all I want Bush and the Congress to accomplish in the next two years. No more ranting about “The Gays”, or flag burning. Forget Social Security for now. Keep the taxes the way they are now. Just do these four things:

1) Create a comprehensive immigration solution that increases funding for border patrol, creates a worker visa program for the existing and future immigrants, and creates a path for citizenship for illegal immigrants in the country now.
2) Restore habeas corpus to everyone, citizen or not
3) Create a real oversight process to any intelligence activities that have any chance on infringing on our privacy as citizens
4) Work with the young Iraqi government, and get them to commit to a series of milestones that will enable us to leave Iraq a functioning democracy.

That’s it. I think if the government can accomplish those four things, most people would look at 2007 and 2008 as two successful years. There are a lot more I wish could be done and changed, but with the Congress and President controlled by two separate years, I’ll settle for this.