Dissident Frogman wrote:
>The V8 bit was mostly an image, yet I understand it might not have been
>a proper one, since you seem to take it literally.
The V8 is actually an icon of the USA, both inside and outside the USA. The joke going around these days shows an M1 Abrams tank pointing its turret gun at
some ragged person, who is smiling back at it and asking "Does that thing have a
hemi?" (Note for non-Americans: the Chrysler 426 Hemi, named for its
hemispherical combustion chambers, is one of the classic muscle-car engines of all time.)
As you are a dissident frogman, I am an iconclastic American. I believe that this icon no longer serves any useful purpose, and it should be allowed to retire to the museums and classic car shows. Our roads, and the roads of the rest of the world, should belong to technology that's both better for us and worse for our declared enemies.
>My point was (is) that scaling down our activity is not the good thing
>to do, particularly in the current context.
I did not mean to imply that anything should be scaled down, save perhaps the height of some of the enormous vehicles coming out of Detroit. (Did I mention that I, personally, develop products for Detroit?) What we (the USA first, perhaps you too?) need to do is start making different trade-offs. Economy and safety should start being higher priorities than speed and power (though with hybrid technology you have the paradox of bigger batteries giving you MORE power at the same time you have GREATER economy), and we should recognize that economy is also a contributor to safety in the form of security for Western civilization.
>That was indeed the reason why I wrote "Our current state of technology
>doesn't allow us to give up on "their" oil yet."
>And emphasized on "yet".
>I learned quite interesting facts thank to your comment, but you apparently
>failed to provide the viable alternatives I was err, "demanding" ...
You may find this in my latest Blog entry "Is the tide turning?": http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/ (I truncated the long URL, so if you are reading this long after March 2004, look for the March 2004 archives). If you do not find what you are looking for, use the mail link provided on my page.
>You have reason to believe that these viable energy sources are right under
>our noses? I'd say we're already using some of them (let's not forget about
>our nuclear reactors, which already helped us a lot to become more
>independent "“ and far less polluting - from Middle East thugs such as the
>Saudi) and I guess the other are actually a bit farther than our nose.
That is not a bad point, but nuclear power is mostly used to generate electricity; nuclear power tends to replace coal, not oil. Most forms of transport (cars, trucks/lorries, buses) cannot use electricity; they can use exactly one type of liquid fuel, and almost all of it comes from crude oil. This is actually an easy thing to change, but we have to demand change.
>So yes, the Saud are funding Madrassas in Pakistan (again, not really big
>news for this frogman), but that was not the reason why I mentioned Pakistan.
>Nuke plans, remember?
After I wrote my first response above, I learned that Gal Luft and Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, [url=http://www.iags.org]http://www.iags.org[/url]) claim that Saudi money had a lot to do with Pakistan's nukes. They make the claim here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11703028_1. Read the whole thing.
>We won't stop these people simply by cutting down our oil orders to the Saud.
I never said we would. Reducing the demand for oil (by any means, whether greater efficiency or displacement by other sources of energy) is another front in the war, not the only front. Are you familiar with the war against Japan in 1941-45? The battles that got the press were fought by soldiers carrying guns, but the war was won by submarines which sank the Japanese freighters carrying raw materials to the homeland. Long before the war ended, the Japanese had no fuel for their trainer airplanes, and they could not train new fighter pilots. They could not make war materiel and get it to the front, so the Allied soldiers were coming against an enemy with poor arms and little food.
If we want to be successful in this war, we have to stop feeding the enemy.