Has America Waved Goodbye?

Peter Hitchens has a great piece from a Brit’s perspective on the Obama frenzy and the most likely outcome of the the upcoming “change”. Excerpts below:

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts…

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in.  No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship…

The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Sec. of Transportation Ignorant About Auto Industry

Csaba Csere had an excellent column back in July.  Unfortunately C&D is much slower posting their columns than their reviews online – and I am much too lazy busy to re-type it myself.  However it is now up for general viewing and is even more pertinant given the current Auto Industry problems being eyed for government intervention.

I always thought April Fools’ Day came on the first of that month and Earth Day on the 22nd, but apparently, this year those dates were swapped. How else to explain the proposal, on April 22, of Mary E. Peters, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, to accelerate by 25 percent the CAFE increases that Congress enacted last year?

With gasoline pushing four bucks a gallon, it’s not that I would mind seeing average fuel economy rise to 35.7 mpg for cars and 28.6 mpg for trucks by 2015, as Secretary Peters proposes. I’d also like to see a big, happy parade of Sunni, Shiites, and Kurds marching merrily together down Yafa Street in Baghdad. Plus, I’d like to see an eight-figure balance on my brokerage statement and Kelly Brook delivering UPS packages to our office. Sadly, none of these events is any more likely than Secretary Peters’s delusions about CAFE.

Now if you come away from this article dogging old G.W.’s administration (or even blanket Republicans) you are completely missing the bigger point.  This is not a W. is stupid problem – this is a general problem with allowing (trusting?) politicians to fix (meddle?) in problems that they truly know nothing about.  Government can give nudges here and there in attempting to direct the market.  BUT economic forces and moreso laws of physics can not be overcome by legislation – no matter how much you will it to happen, nor how pure your intentions.

A perfect example for this would be the legislation that was passed in the hopes to make home ownership “affordable” to those that couldn’t afford it.  Result? Well it took a while to come home to roost but the noble plan cost us all 700 billion dollars and counting.  Remember that as government promises to solve the next problem with a wave of its legistative hand – or rushes aid those in need.

H-H-Oops

In the Dec 08 issue of Car & Driver, Franz Kafka attempts to answer a question about HHO with the help of an associate engineering prof.  The two end up completely off point and so butcher the response that a corrective response was required.  Both are below:

HO-HO-HHO
What would happen if you inject HHO (oxyhydrogen) into a gasoline-combustible engine? Oxyhydrogen is a mixture of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (02) gases, typically in a 2:1 molar ratio, the same proportion as water. This gaseous mixture is used for torches for the processing of refractory materials. I have found numerous claims on the Internet (i.e., www.water4gas. com, www.watertogas.com, etc.) that allege mpg savings by installing an HHO injection kit on a common gasoline engine. Thank you for your help, and please consider us working-class schmucks who might buy into this stuff with gas at nearly $5 a gallon!
Brian Gong
Arroyo Grande, California

Sorry, Brian, those claims are bogus, and you need to stop cribbing from Wikipedia. Lest any reader doubt the indomitable authority of Car and Driver, Kafka asked Claus Borgnakke, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. For starters, you won’t gain any energy by converting water to hydrogen and oxygen in the car–you’ll end up with less useful energy than you put in because both the disassociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen and the burning of hydrogen are less than 100 percent efficient in real-world conditions. Even if you did have a perfectly efficient process, there would be no energy left over to power the car. Starting with an oxyhydrogen mix in the car is a bad idea, too. According to Borgnakke, “Never try to store hydrogen and oxygen gas together. Hydrogen is much more dangerous than other fuels in that it burns at nearly all ratios with oxygen and has a very low threshold for ignition.” You could use an energy source such as solar power to make hydrogen from water, but that’s not cost effective, and you’re still left with the problem of storage. Kafka will leave the last word to our expert, who says, “Hydrogen is still too costly to store and transport compared with gasoline or diesel fuel.”

-Franz Kafka’s Garage

My response:

Kafka

Your HHO response in Dec 08 is so busy feigning intelligence that you miss the fact that the specific laws of physics you snobbishly explain – don’t apply to the question at hand: HHO does not claim to create energy out of thin air.  It simply allows more efficient use of the available energy contained in the gasoline.

1) Gas engines divert a constant amount of energy to the alternator that is converted to electrical energy (yes at less than 100% efficiency).  That energy if unused is soon wasted attempting to overcharge the battery.  HHO draws from this waste power to separate the water into its component gases not to “create energy”,  but as a safe, cost effective way to store the dangerous hydrogen.  Only small amounts of the gas ever exist out of the water state as they are fed into the car as created.

2) The Hydrogen gas adds a nominal amount of energy to the fuel air mixture.  Again, energy is not being created here by violating physics any more than pouring an octane booster into your gas tank.  Water, however, does tend to be cheaper than those fancy additives.  However, much like those additives, the energy boost is small as it would take a tremendous amount of hydrogen gas alone to power a car.

3) The real trick behind HHO is the added oxygen in the fuel air mixture.  It is well understood that more oxygen in the engine means more power potential.  Many after market parts exist to pump cooler air or shove more air into your engine for the express purpose of increasing the oxygen amount in the combustion chamber. Where, oh Kafka, are your snide remarks at those products?

The added oxygen increases the percentage of gas burning inside your engine instead of exiting your tail pipe. Again, energy is not being created, rather less fuel (energy) is being wasted.  This increased efficiency translates into more power at the same gas input or better fuel economy at the same power output.  Herein lies the second caveat to HHO: modern oxygen sensors.  While older cars can bolt on HHO and forever enjoy increased efficiency, newer cars will only see improved MPG for a short period until the oxygen sensors compensate with increasingly rich fuel mixtures until the gains are offset.  So if one wants to run HHO in a current vehicle they must also be prepared to alter their O2 sensors with one of the variety of after market methods available.

Perhaps a senior professor could check this one for you.
Scott

Biden: World Will Generate Crisis To Test Obama

In what is often called political stupidity VP nominee Joe Biden had a fit of honesty at a recent fund raising rally:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy… I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities…”

Why test Obama? I dismiss the “young” theories, but he is extremely inexperienced and all over the map on his foreign policy (half the time we’re unsure he’s aware which nations are currently our allies).  Now the trend amidst his wide array of FP comments seem to be more talking with our current enemies, distancing ourselves from our allies, and pulling back our military as much as possible.  Which could be why the Military support McCain over Obama 68 to 23.  Sen. Biden went on to say:

And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

…Senate Foreign Relations chairman said of Obama. “This guy has it. But he’s gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’

Wait, so we’re going to make tough decisions to respond in foreign affairs in unpopular ways… but we need to do it because in the long run its a good idea??? For a party that claims to hate G. W. Bush above all else, you could swear VP Nominee Joe Biden was channeling him.

Republican Giuliani responded to Biden on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program:

GIULIANI:  My reaction is, maybe we could elect a president that will not tempt the world to test them because of their inexperience.  If Joe Biden is suggesting this, it seems to me that we could elect someone more like Ronald Reagan, who has experience, who the rest of the world has a pretty good idea how he would react and what he would do in the way he would defend America.  I can’t imagine why Joe Biden would want to raise this, but since he’s raised it, it seems to me we should answer…

GIULIANI:  I find the remark very puzzling.  And exactly why he did it and what motivated it only Joe Biden can explain.  I do know that if he’s predicting that the president he’s supporting is going to somehow motivate an attack on the United States, it would seem to me he’s doing it for a reason.  I guess the reason is, the lack of experience that Senator Obama has.  I think he went on to say, “Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy.”

GIULIANI:  Well, I think it would be far better off to have a president that wouldn’t tempt people to want to test his mettle the way Joe Biden is talking about, and it is true that at least history records that that’s what happened with John Kennedy, that Khrushchev tested him and believed that he was flaunting and then went ahead and Cuban missile crisis, other things happened.  But that didn’t happen with Ronald Reagan.  No one tested John Kerry’s mettle.  In fact, they released the hostages as he was being sworn in as president of the United States, if I recall correctly.

RUSH:  Mr. Giuliani, do you realize how many times Bill Clinton was tested by Al-Qaeda, starting in 1993 through Mogadishu to the USS Cole, and every time Clinton was tested, he failed, and that’s why they tested Bush on 9/11… And we haven’t been hit since.

GIULIANI:  I think if we had raised this, there would be all kinds of criticisms that we were trying to frighten people.  But it seems to me that Joe Biden has raised it, and it is a very good point to just ask, well, is there a way to avoid this testing, and maybe if we elect someone with the kind of experience and background that John McCain has, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen, but don’t we give ourselves a better chance as we did with Ronald Reagan, we can avoid this?

RUSH:  Well, look, I agree. I think by definition he was saying there would not be an attack if McCain was elected.

GIULIANI:  I am not sure.  I think we’re going to have to ask Joe Biden this.  But, you know, typical of when Joe does something like this, makes one of these comments, they then hide him for about a week and nobody can get to him to find out what he means. – Transcript Rush Limbaugh

Rudy was certainly right about one thing, Biden hasn’t been seen or heard since this story broke.