That AlGore III is Superman?
The biggest Superman fan in the blogosphere, Oliver Willis (Occupation: Toole), is a little too excited about the next movie installment for the character, methinks.
There is the ring of truth to the parallels between Jor-El trying to roust the people of Krypton to their impending doom and our own Al Gore.
But I just can’t see Ollie Scaredypants going up-up-and awayyyyyy any time soon.
Earlier this week I was doing a bit of travelling, going to a speaking engagement in Kobe, Japan. I cannot even hope to pronounce the school’s name, but roughly translated it is called Butt University of Tokyo.
A little rude, if you want my opinion, but I guess if you don’t want to confuse folks as to what you do….you just speak plainly
So I’m on my second day in Tokyo and the news about the death of the terrorist Zarqawi comes through the cable connection and my room stewardess, Miss Kimiki, a first year student, goes ballistic. In a good way.
It turns out her that brother was an engineer in the Japanese home guard who was sent to Iraq in 2004. He was less than 50 yards away when Zarqawi’s goons blew up one of their trucks. He wasn’t hurt, but you can probably guess how pissed off he was. After she found out, his attitude was hers.
Miss Kimiki was running around with such celebratory zeal, I think she lost her head for a moment.
She was dancing and jumping and screaming so much that no one dared knock on the door to my room for the rest of the morning.
And just to pass along what Miss Kimiki had to say (that I could understand, anyway)Â
“USA! USA! USA!”
I wanted to post this yesterday, but ran out of time, so we’ll do this today.
On Wednesday, Raging Dave at the 4 Right Wing Wackos blog posted about GE finding a way to manufacture hydrogen on the cheap, bringing the probability of hydrogen fueled transportation a little closer.
GE says that they believe they can manufacture hydrogen at a price comparable to today’s gasoline (approx $3 per gallon), but if that is the best they can do, we have a problem, and it isn’t in Houston.
When you compress and ignite a liquid to make it combust, whether it be gasoline, diesel, propane, natural gas or hydrogen, you break that liquid down to individual molecules. No engine to this day can contain the entire act of combustion. This is part of the reason your oil gets dirty; because the explosion and it’s residue blows past the piston and the ring seals and gets everywhere, and is mostly sopped up by the other petrolium product inside your engine block.
The nut of the problem is that Hydrogen ‘fuel’ is made up only of 2 hydrogen atoms (H2), a teeny-tiny molecule when compared to say, Isooctane (C8H18) (aka: gasoline), and especially N-Hexadecane (C16H34) (aka: diesel). Models here.
When you try and squish this itty-bitty thing in a combustion chamber, whole lot of it isn’t going to stick around to be blown up so that your piston will go down, it is going to leak past your rings and into your block.
What this all means is that your fuel mileage, depending on the ability of your engine to keep the hydrogen in the combusion chamber, will be anywhere from 3/4 to 2/3 that of a gasoline engine.
Do the math for $3 per gallon fuel and you tell me which one is more efficient.
For those that don’t know, Japan has some of the most stringent emmisions standards in the world. By 50-60K miles, most Japanese owned cars will need to have their motors swapped out because they won’t meet the emission standards (something the eco-socialist cultists would love to impose on us, btw).
I’ve had multiple vehicles (all Toyotas, I’m proud to say) pass the Washington State Emission Standards at 200K miles, so it isn’t that the engines are worn out at 50-60K, they’re just too worn out to meet Japan’s restrictions. There is a industry in Japan for doing quick and easy swap outs and the sheer number of these, because of supply and demand, means that it isn’t quite as expensive as it is here in the US.
Japan being like anywhere else, there is also a cottage industry for faking IDs; but unlike our problem of fake IDs for illegal immigrants, they fake automotive IDs. If you have a hopped up rice rocket in Japan, you don’t want to bring that thing anywhere near the emmissions center, so you buy a scapegoat car, one of the same year, make and model that will wear your rocket’s plates, VIN# and door bar-coded/elecronic ID tag. You drive that to the center, pass the test and then go on with your life. Some of the car clubs even have one car that everyone passes around for test day. Neat little scam some folks have imported to the US *cough-cough*.
So, your engine will slowly leak more and more hydrogen past your pistons & rings, having been built to higher tolerances so as to get the most mileage as possible from the factory, your wear will be at a faster rate than say, a gasoline engine built to lower tolerances, meaning your milage will plummet, probably shortly after 30K. This is especially so if the factory folks have installed eight to ten sets of rings on the pistons instead of the normal three to five to keep all the pushwater in the tube; all those rings grinding on the cylinder walls…ouch. And because it is built to higher tolerances, it will cost more to manufacture, and therefore, more to replace.
One other added expense of hydrogen engines is this: Take a look at the molecular structure of gas and diesel again; that (C) stands for Carbon. When you pop gas or diesel, the residue left behind is 99% burned carbon. Again, that is what gets into your oil and makes it dirty.
So when you squish a fuel made entirely from large amounts of hydrogen and without carbon you get one of the main pluses of a hydrogen powered engine: Water as exhaust, because of the mixing with oxygen molecules.
But add in the leakage problem and you get……hydrogen molecules mixing with oxygen molecules in your engine block, also known as ‘Water in Your Oil’.
Water and oil are bad things to mix. So you have to use the more expensive ‘Synthetic’ oil and change it more frequently. The vast majority of the ‘Synthetic’ oils you are paying $3-$4 per quart for are just blends (as opposed to $1.50-$2 per quart for regular oil), and those will not get you very far in a hydrogen powered car, so you can only use the pure synthetic oil (hence my prior quote marks around the word synthetic) and those cost $6-$8 a quart. Also, you’ll probably want to/have to change your oil every 2K miles in a hydrogen car because, even though most of it will evaporate due to temperature and steam out of your crankcase vent, water in any block is a bad thing. Then add the 10K mile block flushes and you’ve got one very expensive engine to maintain.
Sure, we can make cars that run on hydrogen. Hell, Ford has a Mustang that’ll run 11 second quarter-miles on hydrogen. But we have, by no sane means, perfected it enough for the soccer mom to run it around town or for Bob from Accounting to drive to work.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but Hydrogen is for breathing and swimming in, not for fueling your car.
As in most cities, the Seattle newspapers are decidedly left leaning. You just can’t get away from it.
But on the subject of Zarqaqi’s death, at least one paper has decided to not play hard-left Democrat sycophant.
The Seattle Times Editorial Board column
Scratch One Problem
Abu Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born murderer, was an impediment, a distraction on Iraq’s path toward self-determination.
His death in a U.S. air raid means that extraordinary efforts and resources focused on him can now be directed other places. This is a not a happy day or a sad day for the Middle East. It is a fleeting moment of brutal pragmatism. In a country rife with home-grown sectarian violence and bloodshed, al-Zarqawi held his own interests, not those of Iraqis, at heart.
It continues on with a relatively even handed couple of paragraphs.
But then again, I’m comparing it to the Seattle Post Intelligencer who goes whole-hog on the Dennis Kucinich trip
The Seattle PI Editorial Board
Iraq War: One down
The Jordanian Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh was a corrupt and violent man long before he called himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The world will not miss the “slaughtering sheik.”
His death at the hands of U.S. forces — his whereabouts apparently betrayed by Iraqi senior leaders from his terrorist network — has to be counted as a blow against the insurgency there.
The only thing more damaging — and satisfying — would have been to have al-Zarqawi in the courtroom dock with Saddam Hussein, answering for his crimes.
And those crimes were manifest, including the deaths of perhaps thousands of Iraqi civilians and the grisly beheadings of at least two U.S. hostages.
But the exact impact of his death on the insurgency in Iraq, let alone what the White House calls “the long war” on terrorism, is unclear. Al-Zarqawi reportedly had lost favor with many Arabs after the bombing of a Jordan hotel, and his brazenness may have made him a rival, rather than acolyte, to the reclusive Osama bin Laden.
Has the insurgency really been decapitated by the death of the “prince of al-Qaida,” or, hydra-like, will a dozen more leaders rise in his place? Will his death encourage the fledgling Iraqi government to assert itself and will it embolden the Iraqi people to support that government?
Celebration of his death is tempered by the fact that it was a U.S. war of choice that set the stage for al-Zarqawi’s rise to bloody stardom.
You see, it is all America’s fault that the guy even mattered. If you ask the PI Board, he wasn’t a problem child until we stepped in. He probably wasn’t even in al-Qiada until we went all military on Islam.
I’m glad they’ll be going out of business soon. I bet they can’t even guess why.
Here in Seattle, maybe in other towns they service, Alaska Airlines dumped the unionised flightline workers for a non-union sub-contractor a few months back. The wailing and gnashing of teeth was tremendous, though hardly worth talking about here.
And then, as if by magic, anytime anything happened to an Alaska Airlines plane that could be blamed on the non-union sub-contractor employees, it made the top of the local news cycle: Front Page of the papers, Lead story on the TV.
There was the baggage cart driver who bumped the donkey into a plane, causing a flight delay and the guy who did the same thing but didn’t tell anyone causing a loss of pressure shortly after take off.
Horrible and stupid mistakes, yes; but now, months later, we are finding out that Alaska’s non-union, sub-contracted employees aren’t the only ones who make mistakes.
Since January 2003, 30 planes have been hit on the ground, nearly all of them by a worker driving a vehicle or moving a passenger jetway, or by a pilot steering another plane.
Seven people have been sent to the hospital, and on 15 occasions workers have left the scene of an incident without reporting it. In all, the airport has tracked 175 incidents on the ramps, the areas where planes are loaded and unloaded.
The actual number could be much higher, but there’s no way to know because the federal government requires reports only when someone is injured or when a plane sustains substantial damage or could be unsafe to fly.
175 incidents, huh? Before the non-union folks came in and by current union employees, some of whom don’t report their accidents?
I wonder if the local reporters knew about this before they started relaying every sob-story about Alaska? I’m sure they must have. 175 incidents is a large number to try and hide.
So why weren’t we told about them?
Because Seattle is a strong union town. You can’t drive through the south end industrial area without seeing dozens of cars with stickers revealing the owners union affiliation.
I’m sure there’ll be a backlash about the Times letting this tale loose.
As was told here by the man with his eye on the news, David, Zarqawi is mostly molecules now, and what isn’t in teeny-tiny is in slightly larger peices and charred.
While I’m glad that the leader of those who want to kill American soldiers in Iraq is dead, I kind of wish it was possible for us to do it while he looked into the eyes of those he wanted to kill.
On another note, the Analog Wife just made her way into the Men’s Room (aka RNS Blogstation Tacoma) to let me know that Diane Sawyer was just on the tube asking if it was ‘A Good Thing’.
I wasn’t really that shocked about her saying that, I was more shocked that no one int eh studio thought to walk up and slap her for asking stupid questions.
So far, we’ve covered Balls Out driving and Passing Practice. This week, I’d like to share music from one of the disks I made up to ‘help’ with driving on mountain roads.
Some call them ‘Tight Twisys’ and some call them ‘The Bends’ and still others call them a royal pain in the ass. I just call them some of the most fun you can have that derive from your federal tax dollars.
There are two local roads that I find are best for this type of driving: SR 410 and Hwy 12. Both of them run through the Mt. Rainier National Park and when travelling east, will both end you up in Yakima, Wa, which isn’t one of the nicest places to end up, unless you’re looking for illegal laborers. Luckily, there is a connector road on the west side of the park, SR 123, that makes a fine and dandy little loop out of them; fun for a day trip.
But a night trip is even better.
After midnight, the campers are all sound asleep and folks in their RVs and 5th wheels are all parked, giving you a pretty decent shot at a good time run.
Switchbacks, Double Esses, drops and rises, this loop has it all and, depending on your vehicles limitations, you can have the time of your life. Just make sure it isn’t the last one you have, because the guardrails suck and the drop-offs are quite sheer in a goodly number of spots.
Today’s tunage comes off of one of my Supra disks. I got a few emails asking why the Balls Out tunage wasn’t speed metal; sorry but for interstate driving, I want something smooth, meaning very few time changes, and metal can’t do that and be metal. Whereas Hardcore Electronica has to, or else it sucks.
Some of the other tunage on the disk includes Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’, Priest’s ‘Breakin the Law’ and Ozzy’s ‘Over the Mountain’.
Not only are they topical, but the wheel base on Supras is long and narrow (pay attention, this will be covered next week as well). Having to swing that whale’s big ass around corners needs musical motivation that reminds you to downshift and grab some grunt as you float the back half of the car around the corner.
And when regular rock music won’t suffice, you do what any red blooded American road racer would do…….
You reach for Metallica
This selection has nothing to do with the fact that they hate people giving their music out for free.
Nope.
The thought didn’t even cross my mind.
I think we can all agree
Secretary General Kofi Annan’s deputy assailed the United States on Tuesday for withholding support from the United Nations, encouraging its harshest detractors and undermining an institution that he said Washington needed more than it would admit.
“The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable,” said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. “You will lose the U.N. one way or another.”
“Losing” the UN would be one of the best things that ever happened to this country.
Right in front of Reagans’s ascention to the Oval Office and behind our ending WWII in Nagasaki.
If dude saw that as some sort of a threat, I’ll take my boots off so that he can see how not-shaking my feet are.
Found @ Captain’s Quarters
Way back in my history at RNS, I used to visit the Seattle Indymedia site. I would often get into tangles with some dweeb there who described himself as a “Anarcho-Socialist”.
He believed that the best form of government was a mixture of Anarchy and Socialism.
Shake your head and re-read that as many times as you want, it still won’t make any more sense; The two societal theories are oil and water and even his lenghty explanations were no use in making sense of it, and I just labelled him an idiot.
So imagine my eyes crossing when I saw Markos Zuniga, the leader of the Klueless Kos Klan, try describing a “Libertarian Democrat”
It’s no secret that I look to the Mountain West for the future of the Democratic Party, people like Brian Schweitzer and Jon Tester. But I also look to candidates like Jim Webb in Virginia and Paul Hackett in Ohio.
And what is the common thread amongst these candidates?
They are all Libertarian Democrats.
Ack, the “L” word! But hear me out.
Traditional “libertarianism” holds that government is evil and thus must be minimized. Any and all government intrusion is bad. While practical libertarians (as opposed to those who waste their votes on the Libertarian Party) have traditionally aligned themselves with the Republicans, it’s clear that the modern GOP has no qualms about trampling on personal liberties. Heck, it’s become their raison d’ etre.
The problem with this form of libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty — the government and other individuals.
The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty — the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.
Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn’t believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.
In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them — corporations and other individuals.
So in practical terms, what does a Libertarian Dem look like? A Libertarian Dem rejects government efforts to intrude in our bedrooms and churches. A Libertarian Dem rejects government “Big Brother” efforts, such as the NSA spying of tens of millions of Americans. A Libertarian Dem rejects efforts to strip away rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights — from the First Amendment to the 10th. And yes, that includes the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms.
From Kos’s description, I’m seeing a Scoop Jackson Democrat or, for a modern day example, almost a Joe Liberman.
Like the idology I mentioned earlier, Libertarianism and Democratic Socialism are oil and water. You cannot mix the two so as to say that government is only a bad thing “Some of the Time”; Libertarians believe it is bad all of the time and socialists believe government is an all powerful diety. Socialists believe that government can fix anything, Libertarians believe that government can fuck up a popsicle.
So, like the IMC dipnut I spoke of earlier, Kos too, is an idiot.
He believes that government can ‘control the power’ of corporations when, if he would read his history, government has created more powerful, and corrupt, corporations than would have evolved if left to their own devices.
But he feels the need to get his Klueless Kids to get out the vote for these candidates, and in doing, mislabels them with his idiocy (remember, Kos choice candidates are 0 for 20).
When the hospitals are run the DMV
Woman forced to give birth to dead baby in hotel
A mother says she was forced to give birth to her still-born child over a toilet in a hotel room after she was turned away from the East Kootenay Regional Hospital because of a lack of beds.
Jennifer Norgate, a mother of three in Elkford, B.C., began her ordeal May 30 when she and her husband Carl travelled to a Calgary clinic for an ultrasound to determine the gender of their 18-week-old unborn baby.
“We were excited to find out if we were having a boy or a girl and to let our other three children know if they would have a brother or a sister,†Norgate said in a letter sent to Premier Gordon Campbell, Health Minister George Abbott, local MLA Bill Bennett and others.
“Unfortunately, we found out that our baby had died approximately four weeks earlier. We were sent home to see our family doctor the next day.â€
Her doctor gave Norgate medication to induce labour and quickly arranged for the couple to see a gynecologist in Cranbrook, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away in southeastern B.C.
But when they got to Cranbrook, they were told there were no beds at the hospital. She was told she’d have to wait in the emergency room or go to a hotel.
Because the couple had no way of knowing how long it would take Norgate to deliver the fetus, they chose to go to a hotel and planned to return to the hospital when labour set in.
Norgate said in her letter she went into labour just before 3 a.m. on June 1 and delivered the dead fetus herself in the bathroom.
When you make something ‘free’, everyone with a stinky fart thinks they need to go to a hospital.
